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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff

Doctor of Philosophy

______Timothy Melley, Director

______C. Barry Chabot, Reader

______Whitney Womack Smith, Reader

______Marguerite S. Shaffer, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

TALES FROM THE : CONSERVATIVE AND THE INVENTION OF MIDDLE AMERICA

by Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff

In this dissertation I show how the conservative movement lured the white out of the Democratic Coalition and into the Republican Majority. I argue that this political transformation was accomplished in part by what I call the "invention" of Middle America. Using such cultural representations as mainstream print media, literature, and film, conservatives successfully exploited what came to be known as the and constructed "" as effeminate, impractical, and elitist. Chapter One charts the rise of conservative populism and Middle America against the backdrop of social upheaval. I stress the importance of backlash and resentment to Richard 's ascendancy to the Presidency, describe strategies employed by the conservative movement to win majority status for the GOP, and explore the conflict between this goal and the will to ideological purity. In Chapter Two I read Rabbit Redux as John Updike's attempt to model the racial education of a conservative Middle American, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, in "teach-in" scenes that reflect the conflict between the social conservative and Eastern Liberal within the author's psyche. I conclude that this conflict undermines the project and, despite laudable intentions, Updike perpetuates caricatures of the Left and hastens Middle America's rejection of Liberalism. Chapter Three illustrates how conservative rhetoric and much of popular culture had merged into a unified message of conservative populism. I argue that the first two movies and the novel and film adaptation of dramatize the Right's talking points on crime and the judiciary, and I describe how they reinforce the conservative movement's construction of Liberalism as effete and out of touch. In Chapter Four I detail the Hardhat Riots of May 1970 to establish the context for my reading of the film Joe, which depicts the resentment-based alliance between white collar economic conservatives and collar social conservatives. I argue that Joe illustrates the conservative movement's ability to win over a majority of voters, without modifying an economic system that perpetuates entrenched wealth and privilege, by forging coalitions built on fear and anger.

TALES FROM THE SILENT MAJORITY: CONSERVATIVE POPULISM AND THE INVENTION OF MIDDLE AMERICA

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff

Miami University

Oxford,

2011

Dissertation Director: Timothy Melley

Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff

2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Postwar Resentment and the Invention of Middle America 10

Chapter Two: The Education of Harry Angstrom—Rabbit Redux and the 91 Charge of the Kerner Commission

Chapter Three: Rough 139

Chapter Four: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend 173

Works Cited 197

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank each of my committee members for taking the time to read and offer their thoughts on my work. To my Chair, Tim Melley, I will never be able to express adequately my gratitude to you for your generosity with your time and energy. Over the years we've worked together, you've been my advisor, counselor, collaborator, editor, and friend. You've been a font of encouragement and patience: you believed in the process and let me work in my own way toward a realization of my project. And the talk you gave a few Springs ago continues to inspire me. Your words clarified for me what we do and why it's important; they centered me and gave me perspective; they were, as I've said to others, "like church." Thank you, Tim. Thank you to Barry Chabot for your friendship and encouragement, for many books, and for the use of the word "work" instead of "text." You have modeled a scholarship based on respect for the writer's labor, which I have tried to live by and pass on to my own students. Thank you also for coming out of retirement to read my work and come to my defense. I'm grateful for your time, energy, and insights, and I feel lucky to have met you. I would also like to thank Whitney Womack Smith for teaching one of the best classes that I've ever taken in my life, a class that drastically expanded my conception of American Literature. Thanks also to Peggy Shaffer, whose recommendations for my reading list enabled me to recognize "culture as history." Love and thanks to my wife Meg, ally and sharer of values, who truly understands time. Once I learned the lesson you taught by example, that is to say, once I learned to think of words as stitches, I finally realized the truth about time and really got down to work. Meg, you're far and away the best person I've ever met in my life. My acknowledgments page would be incomplete without my brothers. Joe turned me on to George Carlin, who taught me that "words are all we have, really." Joe also made me question the point of everything and search for some kind of meaning, a process I eventually learned is given form by literature. I'll spend my life learning the lessons you've taught to me. I thank Jamie for his kindness to me, and for always finding ways to help me move forward. I love and miss you both. Thank you to Matt for all of the time in the cinderblock room. Love and thanks to Janie for the breaks and to Louie for the miles. You two have carved out your rightful place at the center of my universe.

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INTRODUCTION

This dissertation charts the ascendancy of the conservative movement in the during the 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the American Right's narrative on crime, Liberalism, youth, and race was articulated through a new concept of "Middle America" in a range of cultural representations, including mainstream print media, literary fiction, popular literature, and film. These different strands of cultural output combined with the rhetoric of the conservative movement to alienate the white working class from the Democratic Party and realign "middleness" with conservative social values and the Republican Party, a phenomenon that forever transformed the discourse and landscape of American . The conservative movement's goal of winning over the white working class reflects a core conflict that continues to define it. Movements, after all, consist of human beings, and it follows that they tend to be messy and intrinsically contentious; for like human beings, movements tend to be defined by their internal contradictions. The conservative movement in the postwar United States is no different. If recent tributes to William F. Buckley contain any degree of truth, then the man and his magazine, , form the movement's intellectual cornerstone. Jeffrey Hart, who became senior editor of the magazine in 1969, asserts in The Making of the American Conservative Mind that Buckley had in his own makeup such irreconcilable strains of as and (2). Obviously, the dynamic force of the former clashes with the yearning for stasis inherent in the latter, and this conflict indicates an internal dispute at the core of the man, the philosophy, and the movement. Hart describes another set of antithetical inclinations at the heart of Buckley's politics, his "aristocratic conservatism" versus his "intermittent populism" (5). Buckley expressed the former strain, for example, by contemplating the publication of a book that was to be entitled Revolt Against the Masses. His expressions of the latter are less plentiful but indicative of the concerns of this dissertation. Buckley once insisted he would rather be governed by the first two thousand people listed in the telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard, a claim that reflects American anti-intellectualism and its ingrained mistrust of academia and Northeastern liberal elites. Another example of Buckley's mix of sporadic populism and refined sensibility was the book he penned in 1954 with L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, which defended the coarse, drunken demagogue in what was described as "an elegantly academic style replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings" (8). This description encapsulates the tenuous balance the conservative movement sought to establish and maintain. Buckley and Bozell's tome defends a demagogue in a style that would be repugnant to him and his audience; their work makes precise distinctions in defense of a lout who traded in vague equivocations. For if the mission of the conservative movement was to establish a conservative majority, then aristocrats such as Buckley and Bozell needed demagogues such as McCarthy to serve as ambassadors to the masses. Such emissaries suggest the aforementioned challenge facing the wealthy conservatives who wished to foster a movement: they needed to garner support from the majority of the voting public without any serious modifications of the economic system that might jeopardize their positions of wealth and privilege. In other words, how does a movement maintain its elite status while purporting to give voice to the commoners? The answer is to facilitate a change in the public perception of what it means to be an elite, to alter the connotations of the term in the popular mind's eye. Buckley founded The National Review in 1955, and in 1957 he brought in William Rusher to serve as publisher and senior editor. Hart describes Rusher as a midwesterner from

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birth who remained one in his heart. Rusher is also said to have leaned more populist than elitist, and accordingly watched with delight as the "Goldwaterites," with his assistance, "hijacked" the Republican Party from its so-called Eastern liberal establishment (66-67). 1964 thus marks the year that the power base of the Republican Party shifted to the South and the Southwest, or, as Hart puts it, "to the Old Confederacy and the Sunbelt" (147). And as the term hijacked suggests, this was a tumultuous moment for the party. Hart depicts Goldwater's nomination as "the suicide" of the Eastern Establishment, which the GOP had called its home since the end of the Civil War. This suicide resulted from what Rusher saw as "a populist revolt" in the party (147). The violent phrases and revolutionary imagery represent more than a geographic transfer of the Republican Party's locus of power, although that is important, too. Indeed, Hart describes as "astonishing" the idea that the traditional Republican base of Ohio and , which is to say "the entire upper Midwest, , and the states down to the Mason-Dixon line," would be exchanged for a shift toward the South (150). The cartographic permutation of the GOP also paralleled a political and philosophical lurch to the right. Hart describes members of the old guard, such as New York Governor , as looking upon the movement conservatives with "profound aversion" (153). But Rockefeller and his refined ilk had grown soft at the core, leaving him, , Bill Scranton (who, with Rockefeller, vied for the 1964 Republican nomination) and the rest of the "Eastern (Liberal) Establishment" susceptible to usurpation (148). Hart's parenthetical precision offers us a chance to consider an important truth about the complicated and overlapping party system as it existed before it evolved into the mostly clear- cut, staunchly binary, political landscape of contemporary American politics. In short, there was a time when Republicans could lean liberal as well as conservative, Democrats could lean conservative as well as liberal, and members of each party could reside anywhere in between on the grand . During the 1964 Republican National , for example, Rockefeller actually asked his party to hold onto the "sound and honest Republican liberalism that has kept the party abreast of human needs in a changing world" (Rockefeller). Numerous factors contributed to a more ideologically consistent party system, not the least of which were the so-called "movement" conservatives who took over the GOP and rejected the governor's pleas. According to Rick Perlstein:

"Movement" conservatives, they had taken to calling themselves in the wake of the Goldwater crusade, after the example of the civil crusaders. They were a tribe, with their own rituals, kinship structures, origin myths, priests – foremost among them the men atop National Review, editor William F. Buckley and publisher William Rusher. (129-30)

Perlstein describes how the movement distrusted as too pragmatic, too ideologically impure. The debate of whether or not Nixon had any core convictions, let alone what they were, will likely occupy for generations to come. But he surely was pragmatic, and he knew that any realistic assessment of his chances for the presidency had to include the role to be played by the zealots. Thus he is reported to have spent 1964 courting conservatives, telling Buckley after the general election, "If Barry [Goldwater] showed that the Republicans can't win with just the right wing, I showed in 1962 that we can't win without them" (130). Consequently, Republican standard-bearers were pushed increasingly to the right. This occurred during a time when circumstances, which I will discuss below, pushed the Democratic

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Party leftward. Other factors that led to less ideological partisan overlap include the so-called Social Issue and the , which led many politicians to switch parties and turned the Democrats' solidly Republican. In terms of this , there was a great overlap between the Social Issue and what would ultimately become known as the Southern Strategy. In my first chapter I describe how Richard Nixon exploited specific points of contention encapsulated within each of these phrases to fulfill his goal of breaking up the and establishing the GOP as the majority party of the United States. It was in fact two Democratic strategists, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, who recognized the rising Republican tide and coined the term The Social Issue to warn their party that "public attitudes concerning the more personally frightening aspects of disruptive social change" were leading voters to arrange themselves along not just economic lines, but "along the axes of certain social situations as well" (43, 20). In other words, Scammon and Wattenberg argued that the turbulence of the 1960s triggered a socially conservative backlash in the majority of American voters, a majority that the authors alternately called "unyoung, unpoor, and unblack" and "middle-aged, middle-class, [and] middle-minded" (21). As these characterizations suggest, the notion of the "middle" American was from the outset conceived as white and traditional, staunchly ordinary, and positioned in opposition to various other American identities, particularly white liberal "elites," radical youths, and . The Middle American was invented within political works such as Scammon and Wattenberg's The Real Majority, major print media outlets such as Time and Newsweek, and the rhetoric of such politicians as Richard Nixon and , both of whom employed a culturally conservative version of populism to fuel voter anxiety wrought by the turmoil of the era. Their of conservative populism was a means by which the fears and resentments of Middle America were articulated and manipulated by the Right to siphon voters from the electorally declining Democratic Party. Such a notion of conservative populism indicates the fluidity of the meaning of the word populism itself. Michael Kazin explains this malleability by defining populism as "a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter" (1). The essential component of Kazin's definition is language. In other passages Kazin describes how various movements – including agrarians, labor unions, Prohibitionists, anti-Communist warriors, the , , and the conservative movement – have utilized the populist vocabulary. Integral to this vocabulary is the word elite, for all populist rhetoric features an entrenched elite that is, by definition, a minority, a select few who hold power unchecked by the will of the people, the common majority. Hence the idea that the elite acts undemocratically:

Populist speakers in the United States voiced a profound outrage with elites who ignored, corrupted, and/or betrayed the core ideal of American : rule by the common people who expected their fellow citizens to advance by diligence, practical intelligence, and a faith in God alone. (2)

For an explanation of common people, the elite's antithesis, Kazin relies on a definition put forth by E.L. Doctorow, who, by describing them as inhabiting "the large middle world, neither destitute nor privileged,…that of the ordinary " (1), hinted at the eventual conflation

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of the working class with Middle America. Kazin also argues that populist rhetoric generally constructs common people as white and masculine, stating that "White working men never exclusively composed this 'people,' but it was usually shaped in their image" (1-2). We can add that, due to the normative implications of the term ordinary, populist rhetoric has usually been crafted for and aimed toward white, heterosexual, working men who are lauded as the typical, even as the real, Americans. Politicians utilizing such rhetorical devices, however, do not identify themselves as populists in the way that one would identify oneself as a Teamster, a Methodist, or a Republican or Democrat. Populism functions more as "more an impulse than an " because it has traditionally been "too elastic and promiscuous to be the basis for such an allegiance." This elasticity has enabled various American insurgencies to employ "populism as a flexible mode of ," a font of "traditional kinds of expressions, tropes, themes, and images" to convince citizens to join their cause or take their side on issues (3). This lexicon reflects "a powerful and persistent in the public language of discontented citizens" that emerged soon after the American and became especially prevalent in the Jacksonian Age of the Common Man (10). In 1786-87, for example, farmers struggling with low prices and high taxes defied court orders to turn over their in payment of unpaid debts. One rebel, stressing the numerical superiority of his cause, vowed, "I design to pay no more, and I know we have the biggest party, let them say what they will" (13). A decade later, another New England farmer divided "between those that Labour for a Living and those that git a Living without Bodily Labour," and he also stressed that the former outnumber the latter. These words represent nascent versions of "a producer ethic, the central element in populist conceptions of 'the people'" (13). Expanding on this point, Kazin defines producerism as a moral conviction that "only those who created wealth in tangible, material ways (on and under the land, in workshops, on the sea) could be trusted to guard 's piety and " (13). This type of honest and authentic manual labor required a masculinely-coded toughness and a practical sort of knowledge distinct from idle speculation, and having such working-class occupations, doing society's essential work, made "the people" entitled to power (13). Such distinctions anticipate Rusher's efforts to corral his conception of the producer- majority into a conservative alliance against non-producing liberal elites, an ongoing project of his that I will take up in detail below. However, in contrast to Rusher's rendering of the ethos, which aligned entrepreneurs and laborers, the version of the producer ethic from the early Nineteenth Century indicates that many laborers refused to include the entrepreneurial class in such a producer category (14). The notion of an elite still had predominately economic, rather than cultural, connotations, and the language of populism was the language of the Left. The history of the American producer ethic illustrates the extent to which populist language has been inextricably bound with what would become known as Middle America. Early in the American political system, angry white working-class grievances were aired by a man known only as Publius, who argued that the producer ethic was approximately equivalent to what he called "the middling sort," the group that pays the taxes, fights the wars, and is sandwiched between a tiny elite that lives off their labor and a larger, servile and undisciplined group who live in perpetual poverty (14). This "middling" notion forms the essence of a multifaceted definition of Middle America, a "political idiom" that originated with columnist Joseph Kraft who articulated his fear that "'he and his liberal colleagues in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans—in

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Middle America'" (252-53). Perlstein cites the same article, which he explains came in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in . Kraft claimed that media criticism of Mayor Richard Daley and his police for their violent handling of antiwar demonstrators indicated a "systemic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the kind of presidential candidate who appeals to them." In addition to standing with the forces of and against the young and minority groups, Middle America, which Kraft describes as "the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defense against innovation," stand in opposition to "highly educated upper-income whites sure of themselves and brimming with ideas for doing things differently" (365). Middle America also functions as a metaphor that simultaneously conjures the vast, unstylish, and traditionalist region between the two coasts; egalitarian principles; and the sense of being squeezed between the very rich and very poor—"between a condescending elite above and scruffy demonstrators and recipients below" (Kazin 253). This is the large middle world that Doctorow describes, and this is the space commonly constructed as inhabited by the ordinary white working man. Kazin reads the ubiquity of the Middle American during Nixon's first term as an indication of just how successful conservatives had been in their attempt to court them with populist appeals (253). For Nixon, the concept of the Middle American represented a vast and varied group. Over time, his administration identified different but overlapping pieces of Middle America, including Catholics; various ethnic minorities, including Italians, Irish, and Polish Americans; blue-collar workers and members of unions; and Southern whites (Mason 43). To Nixon, whose goal was the creation of a new Republican majority, the most important traits these groups shared in common was an allegiance to the Democratic Party that was wavering due to the impression that the increased of the federal during the 1960s was geared too exclusively toward racial minorities (43-44). Nixon and his strategists hoped that these working class whites, frustrated with paying for programs designed to help African Americans, the very poor, and basically every other demographic category but their own, would revolt against the designers of these programs, the "liberal establishment" (44, 48). The notion of such a liberal establishment being the object of the middling working class's revolutionary fury suggests the extent to which the common man has consistently remained the object of populist appeals throughout American history, while the vilified elite retains its most odious traits as it shifts locations. For Jeffersonians, the elite tended to be pro- British merchants, landlords, and clerics. To , the embedded ruling class was the cosmopolitan and urbane "money power," while the Southern slaveholding interest that fettered human beings and drove down the wages of working whites represented the repugnant for the emerging Republican Party (Kazin 15-16). We can also add to this list the railroad and oil trusts and, as the conservative movement's plan to win over working-class whites suggests, the Right's characterization of Liberalism. The essence each version shares in common is their depiction as "a morbid growth on an otherwise healthy and democratic body politic; its attempt to centralize power in a few hands subverted the principles of self-rule and personal " (15-16). In short, the elite are constructed in populist rhetoric as a clear and present danger to the American Republic. In the context of contemporary American politics, Kazin's account of how these advocates for "the people" describe the elite reads like a transcript of a host (no matter which one) describing a Democratic nominee (no matter which one) for president: "condescending, profligate, artificial, effete, manipulative, given to intellectual instead of practical thinking, and dependent on the labor of others" (15). And because these are

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characteristics of the types of aristocrats we fought a revolution to free ourselves from, the elite are susceptible to claims that they betray the core principles of nation. Such elites are, in a word, un-American. Indeed, in keeping with the of populism as a language, Kazin describes as its "primal grammar" four clusters of belief: Americanism, the people, elites, and the necessity of mass movements (11). The author asserts that Americanism is an ideal of independence and egalitarianism based on a government driven by the will of the people. The continual entrenchment of new and subversive elites who leech off, and thwart the will of, the people require strong mass movements that have gone by such names as "crusades," "," and even "parties" that employ bellicose language to vanquish their elitist foes. These mass movements, populist in nature because of the vocabulary on which they draw, favor a return to "traditional" standards of the nation and have a romantic notion of the "real" America. Thus the movements and their rhetoric tend toward a tone of "cleansing and purification." However, it is important to note that these movements regard the institutions themselves (Congress, the Presidency) as good; their anger is directed toward the corrupt elites who have besmirched them (16). Reverence for American institutions and nostalgia for a blatantly idealized American past continue to serve as populist themes in today's political discourse, but with a decidedly conservative inflection. Populism actually began to migrate from the Left toward the Right, and from the economic toward the cultural, in the 1940s, after which "the vocabulary of grassroots rebellion now served to thwart and reverse social and cultural change rather than to promote it" (4). Until then, conservative populism had been an oxymoron; however, the and the rise of a mass culture indifferent to religious values brought together two of populism's historic impulses: the Jacksonian critique of government officials abetting foreign friends and evangelicals' abhorrence of moral bedlam promulgated by worldly elites. In short, "A battened on these dual suspicions—of the spread of secular decadence and of great federal power in the hands of liberals" (165-66). Tellingly, this version of populism had little to offer folks whose problems emanated from issues such as racial oppression and the economy (166). Opponents of social reforms could now employ language that tapped into the widespread fear of the looming Soviet menace. A plan to institute a national health program could be undercut, for example, by deriding it as socialized medicine (166-67). Despite their paranoia and the stringency of their worldview, postwar red-scare conservatives were politically smoother than FDR's fiercest opponents had been. They avoided coming across as fascists or social Darwinists, they touted broader representations of economic classes, they stopped blaming the for all of the world's ills, and they acknowledged some role for the federal government in assuaging the ravages wrought by poverty. They turned their focus toward what they perceived as a conspiring, underground elite and "found in the storehouse of populist language a potent weapon" for their crusade (167). The new leviathan in this conservative populist rhetoric was a system that started with liberal intellectuals working within expanding universities who formulated treacherous ideas for wealthy celebrities from the entertainment industry to disseminate via alluring images. These populists were people suspicious of change, and "for the first time in United States history, large numbers of activists and politicians were employing a populist vocabulary to oppose reform instead of support it" (167). And as the example of the resistance against national healthcare makes clear, opponents of reform could exploit people's fears to mobilize them against programs that would ultimately benefit them.

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As I noted earlier, this new conservatism had an intellectual foundation. Three strands of thought emanated from the movement, and there are from each who wrote for, or was a founder of, National Review. One such strand was made up of ex-Marxists, such as , , and Wilmoore Kendall; another thread came from the likes of Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley, Jr., and , who were the youths in the movement; and finally there were the veteran anti-statists, including , John T. Flynn, and Suzanne La Follette. All of these writers railed against the new who, they asserted, in a akin to the robber barons of old, had taken over the nation's institutions and were running them according to their own interests at the expense of the greater citizenry. A conflict at the heart of the movement was expressed by the likes of Kendall, a proponent of majority rule, who sparred with the proud elitist (of taste and economics) Russell Kirk. Buckley and Bozell were Kendall's students at Yale, and the professor inspired them to take up their defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom they thought persecuted by a small cadre in the press and government against the prevailing sentiments of the public (171-72). Many of these writers were practicing Roman Catholics who found in their faith an alternative to liberal secularism and the atheism of the further Left (173). Their faith also gave them an in with many in the working-class feeling hostile to and worried about the decline of traditional morality, which provided them with a way to bridge the gap between themselves and the socially conservative white working-class (particularly Catholics) via Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was advancing electorally into a number of Irish, German, and Eastern European areas that traditionally pulled the Democratic lever (186). McCarthy had been a Democrat at the dawn of the New Deal, and during a 1950 debate he accused his former allies of having fallen under the sway of "a group of twisted-thinking individuals" who had taken over, as he put it, "the Democrat party" and imprisoned President Truman. Adding to his working-class allure was McCarthy's refusal to engage in union-bashing (186-87). McCarthy's appeal, the trajectory of his partisan preference, and this newest version of conservatism indicate how "as a language, populism could leap ideological boundaries and attract Americans hostile to modern liberalism as well as those who continued to think fondly of labor unions and FDR's Four Freedoms" (193). Politically speaking, white working class social conservatives, who by the late 1960s would be branded Middle Americans, were in play, and conservatives willing to make some economic concessions and strike the right rhetorical tone had a chance to lure them away from the Democrats' New Deal Coalition. This issue of economic concessions also speaks to a conflict at the heart of the conservative movement. While the GOP knew that to win elections they had to find ways to appeal to increasing numbers of financially modest Americans, instead of ceding ground on pocketbook issues they tended to co-opt the language of populism and remove its fundamental economic connotations. , for example, replaced Roosevelt's use of terms such as trusts and economic royalists with the interests, a phrase designed to elicit images of liberal insiders undermining the will of the greater public (262). It was the brewing tax revolt of the that finally gave the GOP their long-desired in with the majority of voters on an economic issue, and Reagan went so far as to introduce his plan to simplify the tax system on (of all days) Labor Day 1985 in Independence, Missouri, the home of (of all people) Harry Truman. With this speech and a myriad of others, including his first inaugural in which he listed a number of producing occupations, Reagan "captured the language of the New Deal and of earlier populists on the Left" (264). With Reagan's landslides, conservatives had fulfilled their ambitions to re- brand themselves as populist upstarts doing battle against entrenched liberal elites. Only the most

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optimistic of the conservative movement could have imagined the magnitude of these triumphs, especially during the dire years of the early 1960s. In the chapters to follow, I explore these issues in more detail. My first chapter describes the invention of Middle America in political rhetoric and the popular press. I concentrate on the rise of conservative populism, a rhetorical trend that gained strength from The Social Issue and contributed to Richard Nixon standing as the epitome of Middle Americanness. The chapter outlines several major strands of the conservative movement, including the use of the race issue to win over the South and the framing of against the War to affect the political affiliation of Middle America. I also return throughout the chapter to core tensions within the GOP between aristocrats and populists as well as ardent adherents of the and those willing to make compromises on some social programs. By doing so, I illustrate that the goals of ideological purity and majority status are inherently contradictory, and I establish cultural context for my analyses of works that I take up throughout this study. These analyses focus on the impact of specific works of literature and film on the cultural and political dialogue concerning Middle America, Liberalism, race, youth, and crime. In my second chapter I read John Updike's Rabbit Redux as the author's attempt to take up the charge of the Kerner Commission, established in the late 1960s to explain the causes of urban riots, to develop new attitudes about racial issues in the United States by coming to a deeper understanding of the country's history of discrimination and the cycle of poverty. I assert that it was with this end in mind that Updike endeavored to model the racial education of a conservative Middle American who believes steadfastly in the infallibility of America. I show how the novel's "teach-in" scenes, which feature a privileged young and an African American militant attempting to educate Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, reflect Updike's own conflict between the socially conservative small town boy and the elite Eastern Liberal within his psyche, a conflict that ultimately undermines his project. Despite his admirable intentions, Updike perpetuates belittling caricatures of the Left and ultimately expedites Middle America's embrace of conservatism. I focus in my third chapter on how the first two films in the Dirty Harry series, along with the novel and film adaptation of Death Wish, dramatize the Right's talking points on crime and Liberalism. Both Death Wish and Dirty Harry gave dramatic form to Nixon's stance on liberal high court rulings that protect the rights of criminals at the expense of the police, and both films mock liberal approaches to criminality as impractical and effeminate. My analyses of these narratives underscore my point that much of popular culture and conservative political rhetoric had merged into a unified message of cultural populism that lauded working class heroes standing in opposition to an entrenched liberal power structure, coded Liberalism as emasculated, and employed messianic imagery to feed the persecution complex prevalent throughout contemporary conservatism. Chapter Four places the film Joe in the context of the so-called Hardhat Riots of May 1970, which I discuss in detail. My analysis focuses on how the film depicts the resentment- based alliance between white collar economic conservatives and socially conservative blue collar workers at the heart of the conservative movement. Joe dramatizes the tenuous and awkward nature of this alliance, and it warns of the danger of building a coalition on anger. Ultimately, I argue, Joe thus stands as an important artifact of the late twentieth century American electoral realignment because it illustrates that strategists on the Right solved the challenge at the heart of the conservative movement, that is, the desire to win over the majority of voters without seriously modifying an economic system that perpetuates the wealth and privilege of the true

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elite, by forging coalitions built solely on fear, anger, and resentment. The film also stands as an illustration of the "invisibility" of a white power structure, an invisibility that has been facilitated by the rise of conservative populism and the invention of Middle America.

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CHAPTER ONE POSTWAR RESENTMENT AND THE INVENTION OF MIDDLE AMERICA

"What Starts the Process..." I love the simplicity and punch of this Rick Perlstein sentence: "Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments" (21). It invokes images of pettiness and burden, of a man weighed down by envy and spite. And if one were to take the notion of representational democracy at its word, then this man, this serial collector of resentments, served as an illustration of at least one aspect of the American . In his analysis of the 1972 campaign, Hunter Thompson claims that George McGovern and Richard Nixon served as models for the duality of the national character, and went so far as to liken Nixon to Mr. Hyde. To Thompson, Nixon reflects "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise," adding that he speaks for "the Werewolf," "the bully," and "the predatory shyster" in us (416). Thompson asserts that Nixon's reelection marks a continuation of a pendulum effect that began with his initial election four years before. He reads the 1972 mood of the nation as "so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded 'typical voters' of the fear and anxiety they'd felt during the constant 'social upheavals' of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon" (466). And with these words we get further into the heart of the matter. The key difference between Nixon's successes in 1968 and 1972 versus his failures in 1960 and 1962 was the fact that "the constant 'social upheavals' of the 1960s" had not happened yet, therefore he did not really have anything to run against. His time had not yet come. Perhaps Kennedy won in 1960 because "typical voters" were not in the mood to see themselves as typical. Then, after eight and then twelve years, an anti-elitism had set in, and these typical Americans, who now were going by names such as "The Forgotten Americans," "Middle America," and "The Silent Majority," were encouraged to embrace their "regular" status. They did just that, and as a result, according to Thompson, they were in no mood for politicians who wanted to inspire them:

After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavioral sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives—even if it meant turning the whole of Nevada into a concentration camp for , niggers, dope fiends, do-gooders, and anyone else who might threaten the status quo. (466)

To put it more blandly, Nixon's Silent Majority, the foundation of his dream for a new majority coalition, was fed up with the war protesters, the Civil Rights Movement, the potheads, and the Great Society. They resented these forces of change, and they expressed their discontent by electing Richard Nixon, who represented that part of our national character best described as "a serial collector of resentments." Nixon's oft-told story began in Yorba Linda, in 1913. The second son out of five, Nixon's ill-tempered father failed as a lemon farmer and his emotionally-distant mother is said to have directed most of her attention toward two sickly sons who died young (Drew 5). Perlstein recounts a series of incidents that encapsulate Frank Nixon's cruelty toward his sons. The Anaheim Ditch had been dug to deliver fresh water to Yorba Linda's citrus farmers. Children

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could wade in it for fun, but the Nixon patriarch forbade his sons from doing so. According to Perlstein, whenever Frank caught his sons in the water, "he would grab them by the scruff of the neck, haul them out, push them in, taunt them, then throw them in a few more times." Perlstein asserts that the ditch must have shaped one of young Richard's earliest and most enduring impressions of the world, and he cites Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie's speculation that the boy "might well have felt that his father was trying to drown him like an unwanted puppy" (20-21). When Richard was nine, Frank and Hannah moved the family to Whittier, California, where they opened a gasoline station that they expanded into a family-run grocery store. After his graduation from high school, Richard was offered a scholarship to Harvard, but his parents lacked the funds to meet the other expenses of sending him there. Thus he stayed close to home and attended . At Whittier, Nixon led a successful insurrection against the Franklin Club, a social organization comprised of the school's most well-off students who had denied him membership. Elizabeth Drew describes Nixon's founding of a rival organization as "the first of his many battles against people of more privilege" (6). Perlstein makes much of the rivalry between the Franklins and the club Nixon founded, the Orthogonians. He creates a binary structure via which he categorizes the allies and adversaries Nixon encountered in his life and career. Perlstein uses this framework as a means of interpreting such key events as Nixon's rivalry with the Kennedys; his battles with the Eastern Establishment, which included the media, intellectuals, and liberals; and his appeal to the Silent Majority, the Orthogonian multitudes for whom he battled against the Franklin elites. Perlstein claims that Nixon began to flourish when he realized that as an outsider he was not alone, that in actuality, those excluded from the social aristocracy were necessarily in the majority. While the Franklins were well-rounded, orthogonian basically meant "at right angles"—they were "upright" and "straight shooters." While the Franklins were graceful, smooth, and slick, the Orthogonians were for strivers, for commuter students such as its founder, who "persuaded his fellows that reveling in one's unpolish was a nobility of its own" (22). This was the nascent stage of Nixon's brand of cultural populism, and he was learning the lessons that would serve as the foundation of his political career. In his memoirs, RN, Nixon proudly states that the Orthogonians posed for their yearbook pictures in open-necked while the Franklins posed in tuxedos. He also notes that his group recruited men who were working their way through school and athletes (17). Tom Wicker emphasizes the class distinction at work here, citing Nixon's recounting to a journalist years later that The Franklins "were the haves, and we were the have-nots, see?" According to Wicker,

In one way or another, whether socially, financially, intellectually, or all three, this distinction was to remain important in his life and career, in both of which, despite considerable achievements, he seemed always to regard himself as a kind of have-not; and he never appears to have felt himself part of an Establishment—save possibly that of Republican party professionals. (9)

Perlstein, as I indicated, also recognized the class struggle, but he took it a step further and connected it to the structure of team sports. Noting Nixon's gift for seeing beneath the surface to the buried seething truths, Perlstein recognizes in the future president's Orthogonian recruiting the insight that every sports team has only a couple of star players, and that "the surest, if least glamorous" means of garnering its support "is to concentrate on the nonspectacular – silent – majority. The ones who labor quietly,

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sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the lineman, the guards, the punter" (22-23). Goldwater's 1961 appeal to the "silent" and "forgotten" Americans (soon after Kennedy's victory) and Nixon's 1969 overture to the Silent Majority were still decades away, but Perlstein's analysis reads as if he were interpreting those speeches with a metaphorical flourish. The Franklin quarterback and a few other big men on campus represent the elite establishment, the power center toward whom the unsung blue collar players seethe resentfully as they labor in the trenches—working hard, paying taxes, and going to church. Armed with such realizations, Nixon defeated a Franklin for the student body presidency. Those who knew Nixon then thought him unlikely, indeed "the man least likely," to succeed in politics. He was quiet and brooding, unable to get a girlfriend, and he attracted enemies. But Nixon was learning that "being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority" (23). What we see during this period of Nixon's life is how he came to recognize his constituency, those who would make up his winning coalition and would function as the basis upon which he placed his for a permanent political majority. Nixon would lead a coalition of the resentful, an oppressed majority. Perlstein articulates this key paradox:

[T]he greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren't always really so powerful at all, Franklin "power" often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white . (23)

Thus my claim above that Nixon succeeded in 1968 and 1972 where he failed in 1960 because his time had not yet come. However exaggerated their grievances were, the turmoil of the 1960s gave the so-called Silent Majority tangible images on which to focus their resentment. And Nixon and Agnew would provide the words; they would build the conceptual structures within which these antagonisms could thrive. They would build a politics of positive polarization and wedge issues upon the premise that people vote against rather than for candidates. But before then there were more resentments for Nixon to collect. After graduating from Whittier, Nixon's parents once again could not afford to send him to a prestigious institution, and he held down several jobs while attending Law School. Upon graduation, his applications to prominent Wall Street firms were rejected in favor of those who had attended more esteemed law programs. This embittered Nixon, who returned home to Whittier (Drew 7). Perlstein describes Duke as an Orthogonian institution striving in the shadows of the Franklin Ivies. He elaborates on Nixon's failure to secure a Wall Street job by noting that the top two members of his class procured such positions, but Nixon had graduated third. His high ranking resulted from marathon study sessions in the library, which earned him the nickname "Iron Butt" (23). Tom Wicker asserts that Nixon not only had the perseverance to earn such a moniker; he had faith in what it symbolized. The implication is that Nixon believed in hard work and upward mobility. More explicitly, Wicker claims that this faith, as it often does in ambitious and diligent Americans, "had generated a degree of bitterness toward, sometimes contempt for, those 'gifted colleagues' in their tuxedos, to whom good things came more easily, who therefore somehow deserved them less" (9). Wicker may as well be talking about those Franklins who wore tuxedos for their yearbook photographs, or those freshly minted lawyers working on Wall

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Street simply because their parents could afford to send them to Ivy League law schools. He may even have been talking about those in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who also turned down Nixon for a job. Their application asked for a list of relatives currently involved in government service, to which Nixon had to reply "none." Even the Bureau eschewed outsiders (Perlstein 23). The key here is that despite his successes, Nixon was constantly reminded of his outsider status. Each of his accomplishments introduced him to a new layer of elite to which he was denied access. Thus was Nixon's ambition intertwined with bitterness and resentment; his striving was fueled largely by anger. Wicker cites comments Nixon made to a friend after having moved to New York, comments made after his presidential defeat in 1960 and his gubernatorial humiliation in 1962:

What starts the process really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. Sometimes it's because you're poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts. (9)

Wicker literally emphasizes the anger and the fat butts, and for good reason. The way Nixon describes it in this passage, anger fuels his ambition. Anger is not only good; it is a necessary component of the process of upward mobility. Nixon was thus a serial collector of resentments in large part because they nourished his aspirations; his bitterness kept him starved for approval— the approval of those who laughed and slighted and snubbed. Hence Perlstein parenthetically notes that "if there is one thing an Orthogonian secretly craves, it is a Franklin seal of approval" (37). If one has moderate intelligence and is thin-skinned enough to be deeply and powerfully angered by the rejection of inside elites, that anger can be used as an incitement to work hard and change their attitudes and gain their acceptance. What is particularly noteworthy about Nixon's life is how he utilized not only his own bitterness, but the bitterness of his constituency to further his political career. He stoked the resentment elicited by the Silent Majority's own perceived outsider status, and he trumpeted his position as one of them in order to garner their support and gain power. But before he became president there was Nixon's stint in the navy, which was followed by political triumphs and humiliations. Drew asserts that throughout his life in politics, Nixon talked frequently about his enemies, both actual and merely perceived, especially those he considered to be from among the privileged and elite. More importantly for our purposes, these sentiments bled into Nixon's politics. In 1946, Nixon ascended to the House of Representatives by defeating incumbent , whom Drew describes as liberal and the "scion of a wealthy family and a graduate of Yale" (9). In essence, Voorhis embodied all that Nixon truly hated; he was the archetypal Ivy-educated, aristocratic liberal against whom Nixon would rail and cultivate Middle American (before there was such a term) resentment. As Nixon's first opponent for public office, Voorhis was, in a word, perfect. Voorhis enabled Nixon to trot out themes that would characterize not only his own political career, but the postwar conservative movement as well. Nixon ran a conservative populist campaign, and lauded himself an advocate for the "Forgotten Man." For assistance, Nixon employed , an operative who worked on the principle that people voted against, rather than for, candidates (10). Hart contends that every political race Nixon ran featured "something ethically

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questionable, with the sleazy figure of Murray Chotiner always in the background, treating every contest as a war without rules" (198). Perlstein describes one such ethically questionable move. In his 1946 campaign, Nixon asserted that he welcomed "the opposition of the PAC, with its communist principles" (27). Nixon had actually meant the National Citizens Political Action Committee, but remained steadfastly cryptic when making such references because the Times had recently asserted that the Congress of Industrial Organizations' (CIO) PAC was dominated by communists. This is the politics of ambiguity and insinuation: present the notion of a PAC and let the electorate make their own connections. When confronted with the fact that Voorhis had told the CIO-PAC that he would reject their endorsement if proffered, Nixon, while the crowd cheered him on, put forth a list of people who sat on the boards of both groups. This guilt by association smear tactic also permitted Nixon to appear as the one being attacked. Employing the hustler's parlance, Perlstein describes a technique Nixon and Chotiner would perfect: give the "mark" the impression of a -up to foment the conceit of advantage and entice him or her to

pounce on your "mistake." That makes him look unduly aggressive. Then you sprang the trap, garnering the pity by making the enemy look like a self-righteous and hyperintellectual enemy of common sense. You attacked jujitsu-style, positioning yourself as the attacked, inspiring a strange sort of protective love among voters whose wounded resentments grow alongside your performance of being wounded. (28)

We see here descriptions of many of the key elements of both Nixon's career and the postwar conservative movement, from a contrived victimhood to an anti-intellectual championing of realistic, practical thinking. And most importantly, Nixon cultivated "wounded resentments" among voters and merged them with his own. As Perlstein puts it, the "pinko" was established as "but another specimen of Franklin," while Nixon used his campaign posters to label himself "One of Us" (28). And this notion of "One of Us" concerns me most in this particular project. As fascinating as Nixon's pre-presidential career was, from the case to the , from the Caracas riots to the "last press conference," my goal is not a detailed history of Nixon's public life but an overview of his preoccupations and techniques for the purpose of underscoring how he functions historically as a quintessential figure of Middle American resentment and conservative cultural populism. As I noted above, Nixon finally won the presidency, and the conservative movement was ready to claim its majority, when social upheaval brought nebulous resentments into focus, and notions of elite and establishment had fully taken on cultural rather than economic connotations. Until that time, Nixon worked these themes on different scales with varying degrees of intensity. In 1950 he defeated fellow Representative for the Senate. Although the wind was at his back, Nixon shored up his chances by combining anti-communist sentiment and cultural populism. Dubbing Douglas the "Pink Lady," Nixon also charged that she was an eastern elitist while stressing his own modest background (Drew 12). Nixon's rise continued in 1952 when General Dwight Eisenhower selected Nixon to join his presidential campaign as his running mate. However, Nixon's spot on the ticket became imperiled when it was revealed that he had access to a fund established by wealthy backers to cover his political expenses. Although not illegal or even , the controversy jeopardized Nixon's vice presidential bid because Eisenhower had been stressing the need to clean up the

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corruption in . In what was to become known as Checkers Speech, Nixon, according to Drew, "presented himself as a plainspoken man of modest financial means, once again identifying himself with the common man" (15). During his speech, the embattled Senator candidly discussed the state of his family's finances, what he owned and what he owed, before segueing into the bit about the cocker spaniel. Playing the victim to the hilt, Nixon set up Checkers' introduction by complaining "one other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don't, they'll probably be saying this about me, too" before concluding with the declaration that "regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep it." Reading and watching the speech from this historical perspective, one is struck by how late in the address the dog actually shows up, and how much more speech is left after he does. Aside from aligning himself with middle class people who worked hard, drove a modest car (a 1950 Oldsmobile), owed on a mortgage, and had children who loved their dog, Nixon pivoted as he had in his race against Voorhis and attacked from the position of victim. Nixon's pounce was that of a conservative populist, cutting into the soft underbelly of his boss's opponent, Governor Adlai Stevenson:

I believe that it's fine that a man like Governor Stevenson, who inherited a fortune from his father, can run for President. But I also feel that it's essential in this country of ours that a man of modest means can also run for President, because, you know, remember Abraham Lincoln, you remember what he said: "God must have loved the common people – he made so many of them."

With this dig, Nixon painted the Democratic standard bearer as the elitist in the race. He also aligned his status on the ticket with the health of America's democracy, invoked the specter of Abraham Lincoln, and demonstrated his affiliation with the common majority. Advancing with aggression, Nixon highlighted the recent revelations that Stevenson himself had benefited from two such funds that had brought this ordeal onto him. He goes on to note that Stevenson's running mate, Senator , had his wife on the payroll, and suggested that both men should go before the American people as he did to explain their own outside sources of income. Nixon's address is prominently featured in Perlstein's work, which stresses the idea that during Nixon's rise there was coming into focus two postwar ideological Americas. These two Americas could receive precisely the same input and then put forth polar opposite interpretations. Case in point, the Checker's Speech.1 Per his request, members of his audience wired and wrote the Republican National Committee and expressed their opinions about whether or not Nixon should stay on the ballot. Two million telegrams poured in, and "a careful sample" indicated that 99.6 percent of them were positive (Perlstein 40). Perlstein reads these supporters as Orthogonians who believed that they and Nixon were together in their commonness; and since Nixon was being persecuted for being common, then they somehow were as well. Others, however, were baffled that such obvious schmaltz would work on anybody. Not surprisingly, these cynics included members of the press corps – the media elites, one might say – who lamented the audacity of the swindle. Perlstein cites a Sacramento Bee editorial that derided Nixon as "the pet and protégé of rich Southern Californians" and a New Republic article that ridiculed him as a "kept man." Each bemoaned the fact that those with a standard of living far

1 Interestingly, in his memoirs, RN, Nixon refers to this address as "the fund speech" and does not mention the section about his family pet (101). Checkers himself appears later in the photographs section, happy and chubby in images captured from the early Sixties, verifying that the Nixons did in fact keep him. 15

below that of the affluent class considered Nixon their champion. Another columnist in the Checkers aftermath noted that Nixon had "suddenly placed the burden of old-style Republican aloofness on the Democrats" (41). With this comment we see that the definition of elite was in flux; it was shifting from its economic origins to a cultural context. Where one was situated along this cultural divide could determine a myriad of things, such as one's reaction to Nixon's address, be it the Checkers or fund speech. Economics did have a vital role in this of the term elite, though. Indeed, the transformation of the connotation could not have happened without an expansion of prosperity. Perlstein makes the case that liberals had composed the New Deal policies that provided ordinary workers with economic security and then, after the war, developed a consumer economy that democratized abundance and established the middle class. Ironically, this comfort left workers susceptible to Republican overtures, and their concerns tended to center around "those of keeping" rather than "those of getting" (42). Furthermore, it did not take long for this of abundance to morph into an ethos of mass consumption. And as Perlstein eloquently puts it, "the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator" (42). While liberals shifted their judgmental focus from economic matters to concerns of taste, the working classes were increasingly better off and convinced that they, too, could be Republicans. Perlstein asserts that Nixon became the apotheosis for this new-style "politics of mass consumption." This was a politics that

felt divorced from any mature and reasoned and logical analysis of who really ran things in society, who were the real economic beneficiaries, how power really worked, elite liberals thought. This was a new style of political demagoguery, a kind of right-wing populism, almost. (42)

Although the New Deal coalition would survive for almost two more decades, such cultural shifts highlighted its fault lines just as the postwar conservative movement began to burgeon. The conservatives would make their move toward majority status by purporting to give voice to common people and vilifying cultural elites and intellectuals. Drew notes that Eisenhower in 1952 was able to present himself as dignified and above the political fray because of Nixon's willingness to wallow in partisan attacks and red-baiting, and his ability to draw "on a deep vein in American politics: anti-intellectualism" (14). Nixon aide Ray Price insisted that to fit in with the electorate, to be "one of us," as the went, Nixon pretended to be "less than he was, in the sense of concealing his introverted and cerebral self in order to become more appealing to voters" (27). In other words, Nixon was smarter than he acted, which offers us an indicator of how patronizing and ultimately demeaning this brand (all ?) of populism could get.

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Going Down to the Crossroads After Nixon's defeat in 1960, Republicans took a step back for the requisite postmortem assessments of identity, creed, and strategy. Robert Mason, in his Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority, describes this transitional period for the GOP. Right around the time of Kennedy's inauguration, Senator issued "A Statement of Proposed Republican Principles, Programs and Objectives," which spoke to the "forgotten" and "silent" Americans who, as Goldwater put it, "quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving" (5). According to Mason, Goldwater identified these overlooked Americans as the voters who could propel the Republican Party to majority status. The numbers at the time suggest that the Party of Lincoln had a lot of work to do. Mason cites Gallup polls indicating that between 1960 and 1964, the percentage of voters identifying themselves as Republicans fell five points to a mere twenty-five percent, while those labeling themselves as Democrats ticked up six points during this same period to fifty-three percent. One bright side for the GOP was the fact that their supporters tended to be better at showing up to vote (14). And although they did not know it at the time, more good news for Republicans included the fact that Democratic electoral fortunes were actually peaking. This impending sea change seems to have had little to do with Goldwater and his ideas, at least his ideas regarding . He attacked two basic tenets of Liberalism, that government should play a role in providing a social safety net for the underprivileged in the American capitalist system, and that it should intervene occasionally and cautiously to ensure economic health and stability. Goldwater insisted such meddling undermined foundational principles of self-reliance and resourcefulness, and that it catered to special interests and ultimately threatened liberty. Certain that most Americans agreed with him, Goldwater argued that by pitting itself against an ever-encroaching big government, the Republican Party could break up the dominant Democratic coalition. Goldwater, of course, bore the GOP standard in 1964 and was electorally massacred. Four years later, Nixon struck many of the same rhetorical chords as his predecessor but won the presidency (5-6). And like Senator Goldwater before him, Nixon openly sought to supplant the New Deal coalition with his new majority. How did Nixon succeed (barely) where Goldwater failed so spectacularly? One cannot underestimate the impact of Kennedy's assassination; Johnson, after all, was carrying the torch for a president murdered less than a year before. Also, Johnson had yet to wear the country out with his Great Society at home and his Great Catastrophe in Vietnam. But besides each of these important factors, Nixon seemed to have understood something crucial about the American voter that Goldwater either failed to recognize or was too ideologically stringent to accept. According to Mason, Nixon was thematically opposed to "big government" but never challenged the existing notion of an activist government. His criticisms tended toward images of an unresponsive bureaucracy and the idea that too many new programs helped too few people while ignoring the plight of others. Nixon did little to turn back the tide of an increasingly active government; indeed, he actually proposed new programs and increased federal spending. As Mason succinctly puts it: "He was no Goldwaterite" (6). Rhetorically, however, Nixon echoed Goldwater in his use of the term "forgotten American." Interestingly, the phrase extends at least as far back as Franklin Roosevelt, who sought to help "the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." These were the folks bearing the brunt of the , and Roosevelt launched the New Deal with them in mind. These constituents in turn formed the backbone of the emerging Democratic majority. Three decades later, Goldwater used the term in reference to voters he perceived as lamenting the

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ways in which politicians had forgotten the electorate's individualistic conservatism. Nixon read their attitudes toward government intervention differently and focused instead on the anxiety elicited by the abrupt social changes of the 1960s (7). In other words, Nixon saw his opportunity to appeal to wide swaths of the New Deal coalition by focusing on what strategists Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg would eventually dub "the Social Issue." And unlike Goldwater, Nixon was pragmatic enough to discern that while Americans favored the principles of smaller government and self-reliance, they simultaneously supported in overwhelming numbers specific government programs. Thus, as Mason interprets the data, conservative impulses and liberal beliefs coexisted in people; the majority of Americans tended to be "ideologically conservative" and "operationally liberal" (10). With that in mind, Nixon railed against the bureaucracy with no real intention of cutting social programs. When he used the term "forgotten American," it was stripped completely of any economic connotation. As I indicated above, Nixon was a few years ahead of authors and operatives Scammon and Wattenberg, who argued in The Real Majority (1970) that the Social Issue would come to dominate American electoral politics. I will discuss their book in detail below. But for now, I want to emphasize their assessment of the political center, which they argue tends toward the liberal on bread-and-butter (read economic) issues and conservative on social issues (read crime, morality, and permissiveness). These voters make up the moderate core of American politics, the vast segment leery of upheaval and protective of their Social Security and social values. Nixon sensed that this massive electoral middle ground was composed of his people, Middle America, the ones forgotten in all of the chaos and shouting of the 1960s. He would address these forgotten Americans as "The Silent Majority," and he knew that many of them had begun their voting lives as New Deal Democrats but were feeling uneasy about the radical turn they felt liberalism had taken. Nixon courted these voters via the Social Issue, but almost lost too many of them to Governor George Wallace who successfully, if more stridently, addressed the same basic concerns. To succeed in building his New Majority, Nixon knew he needed the Wallace voters. He also knew that he needed to carry the South, a fact that William Rusher and The National Review realized in the early 1960s. In February 1963, publisher William Rusher assessed the results of the then-recent interim elections and asserted that the GOP had "a rendezvous with a new idea." Rusher set up this new idea, which he put forth in his article "Crossroads for the GOP," by explaining that political pundits and soothsayers had almost always concurred that the only pertinent question that went into the selection of a Republican presidential candidate was who had the best chance of winning. According to Rusher, this question smoothly coalesced with an inquiry into who could carry New York and California, two electoral college behemoths crucial to any hope that the GOP could secure the presidency. The answer to this question, which Rusher found both odious and inaccurate, was Nelson Rockefeller. Rusher delights in the shock he imagines the recent 1962 returns must have had on the "practiced pragmatists" touting the inevitable nomination of the Liberal Republican . He reads the numbers as revealing that Rockefeller, "nor any other Republican, real or nominal," had any better chance of beating Kennedy in New York and California than Mao Tse-tung. Rusher's distaste for his party's longstanding practice of elevating the practical over the principled comes across clearly, as does the distinction he makes between authentic and merely ostensible Republicans. Rusher also seems to enjoy proposing that the GOP shift their focus from the coasts to the Southern and border states, thereby securing most of the region's 165 electoral

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votes (keeping in mind 270 are needed to win). Finally, Rusher relishes his conclusion, which is that Barry Goldwater – not Rockefeller, or even Romney or Scranton – would have the best chance of winning over these voters. In short, Rusher proposes that the Republican Party shift its strategic attention away from the coasts (especially the East) and toward the South, eschew his party's liberal plank, and definitively recreate itself as staunchly conservative. Rusher supports his proposal by explaining in detail why any Republican nominee, and Rockefeller in particular, would almost certainly lose New York and California to Kennedy (obviously the presumptive Democratic nominee at the time of the article's publication) in 1964. With that in mind he turns his attention to below the Mason and Dixon line and sketches an early version of what would become known as Operation Dixie, a precursor of the Southern Strategy. Asserting that Southern allegiance to the Democratic Party has been the result of bitterness wrought by Reconstruction rather than ideological camaraderie, Rusher claims that the region's "mulish but understandable prejudice has forced them into unnatural association with Northern entities and ideas that every true Southerner instinctively loathes." His use of the term understandable suggests that Rusher is not only suggesting a new strategy for his party, but gently courting voters ready to break with tradition. The phrase true Southerner recalls the notion of the nominal Republican mentioned above; Rusher works from a strict concept of authenticity and demonstrates little patience for gray areas, which enables him to speak comfortably of nature and instinct in a political context. This arrangement between the South and the Democrats seems to bother him on philosophical and political levels, the latter highlighted by his claim that most Democratic candidates over the last twenty elections were spotted one hundred electoral votes before the campaign even began. But he recognizes on the horizon the end of this era. Parenthetically citing H.L. Mencken, who characterized the Democratic Party as "two gangs of natural enemies in a precarious state of symbiosis" (and the key word here in the context of Rusher's argument is precarious), Rusher proposes that Republicans facilitate factional realignment by making a direct overture to the Southerner's conservative predisposition by nominating a candidate from the right flank of the party. The Democratic vice grip on the South started to loosen after the second world war, an event Rusher reads as having tempered the traditional hold on the Southern mindset and "ruthlessly homogenized American youth." Other factors undercutting the uniqueness of the Southern, agriculturally-centered way of life include the modernization of its economy and the rise of faster modes of communication and transportation, specifically the electronic media and jet airplanes. Rusher sees Southern cities filled with white-collar and professional workers who "drive home to split-level suburban ranch houses every evening, looking and acting for all the world like their Northern and Western counterparts." His point is that as these citizens became less traditionally Southern, they became less Democratic. Citing Time, Rusher notes that in the eleven states of the Confederacy, GOP candidates for the House of Representatives received 31 percent of the votes cast in 1962 compared to 16.3 in 1958. Voting Republican for the presidency, by contrast, had been somewhat more common, especially since Southern districts benefit tangibly from the seniority of their conservative Democratic representatives. Rusher stresses that these new Republican voters are unfailingly conservative, and they want their party and their presidential nominee to match their conservatism. Rusher quotes Republican state chairmen courting potential converts at registration rallies to demonstrate that teetering lifelong Democrats will switch parties for a conservative, "but not," as the Chair of the GOP stresses, "for a Rockefeller or any other Liberal."

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And with that idea in mind, Rusher steels his forces against the inevitable counterattack, pitting his Southern and Western conservative populists against the old guard of the liberal Eastern elites, especially the media. He presents the image of one such scribe with "the vichyssoise of his most recent White House dinner still fringing his petulant lower lip" recoiling at the supposed inherent in any Republican play for Kennedy's Southern voters. Rusher presents this image of the liberal media hobnobbing in the corridors of power, eating hoitytoity food and crying racist foul not only to prepare his allies for their opponents' rhetoric, but to reinforce his side's own populist credibility. They are revolutionaries, storming the castle and upsetting an old guard, especially the New York GOP, which will not go down without a fight. Not only will these entrenched elites counter with charges of racism; they will stress the importance of not alienating liberal voters in the big cities of the North. To the latter, Rusher seems to be saying "to hell with 'em; we don't need 'em." To the former, he is ready to have the argument and underscore just how the symbiotic relationship of the two natural enemies at the core of the Democratic coalition has functioned. His article shines a spotlight upon the opposing party's fault line, upon a core conflict at the heart of the alliance. Rusher points out how the Democrats for eighty years had nominated integrationist candidates while reaping the benefits – 95 percent of all Senate and House seats, to say nothing of state offices – of local Southern segregationist platforms. To say that this is a strong point would be an epic . Stepping out of the Rusher article for a moment, we can think about how both , in a 1948 speech, implored his fellow Democrats that "the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights," and George Wallace, who in his 1963 inauguration speech elicited images of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy to rail against the tyrannical federal government violating 's sovereignty before bellowing "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" (Lesher 174), coexisted under the same Democratic . Of course, the Minnesotan's speech contributed to a wave of Southerners leaving the party and forming the , led by , who at the time of Rusher's article was still a year shy of joining the Republican Party. This notion of a third party way station between the Democrats and Republicans will appear below when I discuss Kevin Phillips and his The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips saw New Deal Democrats who supported Wallace in 1968 against Humphrey (note that the symbiosis had been precarious) as incrementally transitioning to the GOP via the Alabaman's own third party bid. Rusher, for his part, stresses that the Republicans were not courting the racist vote. Rather, their natural consistency resides in the Southern cities and suburbs, while the Democrats rely on hard-line segregationists and "primitive wool- of the Alabama backwoods." That said, he does grant that Southern Republicans make no apology for opposing the Warren Court's attempts at "social pioneering." He also acknowledges that there are likely to be differences in opinion on the race issue between Northern and Southern members of the GOP, and that it would make sense for a national party to reflect the national divisions on such an issue, as the Democrats had for so many decades. He concludes by reiterating that Barry Goldwater is the only Republican who could take enough Southern and border states to stand a chance against the president. And he stresses that win or lose, a Goldwater nomination would lay the foundation for the nationalization of the Republican Party and set the stage for victories in 1968 and beyond. Two months later, James Jackson Kilpatrick took up National Review's Goldwater charge with his own assessment of the changing landscape of Southern politics. In the April 9, 1963 issue, Kilpatrick describes the results of the 1962 election in the Third Congressional District of

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Virginia, in which a conservative Republican political novice would have unseated a incumbent had an extremely conservative third party candidate not siphoned off the sliver of votes that would have put him over the top. Kilpatrick reads the election as evidence that the incumbent's association with Kennedy and the National Democratic Party hurt him, while his Republican challenger's cause, by contrast, was buoyed by its association with Senator Goldwater, who appeared with the campaign in October. Kilpatrick concludes that Barry Goldwater was strong in the South, and would perform well in the region as the Republican nominee in 1964. itself had gone into the Republican column in each of the three presidential elections since 1952, and the author estimates that a true conservative such as Goldwater could carry at least nine of the thirteen Southern and border states for a total of 100 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Kilpatrick reads Goldwater's strength as emanating from his conservatism, the clearest contrast in the field to the era's prevailing liberalism. He presents the Senator as the president's polar opposite, and the embodiment of principles held dear by the conservative South: "States' Rights, strict construction, , private enterprise, and America first, last and always." Add to that his criticism of the and leeriness toward foreign aid, his eagerness to reign in organized labor, his opposition to deficit spending and a weak currency, plus his staunch support of responsibilities staying in the hands of states and localities, and Goldwater appears to be the South's dream candidate. But his dreaminess does not stop there, and here Kilpatrick gets just a little weird: "He is a soldier and a patriot; he has charm, grace, and good manners; and these characteristics are contained, moreover, in a Rhett Butler maleness that men find attractive and the girls find divine." Kilpatrick does acknowledge some drawbacks to this ideologically-sound hunk of man with the good manners, though, especially in matters of race. It turns out that the Senator believes in integration. This does not concern the author, though, because – in one of his more pronounced prophetic lapses – Kilpatrick sees the issue as having lost much of its potency in most of the South. In addition to that, Goldwater "is not rabid on the subject" and "he does not propose to abolish state authority altogether." The Senator also benefits on this issue from comparison with the president, who sent 17,000 troops into and has a brother, Bobby, who is "the pal of King." The contrast with Liberal Republicans also cast Goldwater in a positive light, for Kilpatrick describes Nelson Rockefeller as suffering from "the civil rights hysterics." Speaking of the devil, so to speak, Kilpatrick concludes by stressing that the South will not accept the New York Governor as a presidential candidate. He claims the region to be thinking drearily of a Kennedy-Rockefeller match-up but hopefully of one between Kennedy and Goldwater. He asserts that in the former contest, absent a true conservative, the region would likely go for Kennedy or various third party or independent candidates (thinking for a second about the outcome of the 1968 election, this claim was one of the author's stronger prophetic moments). To carry the South, Kilpatrick argues that a GOP candidate has to be staunchly conservative, a clear contrast to the liberal Democrat. Recalling Virginia's Third District in his -up, Kilpatrick concludes that "what counts these days in Dixie is that Kennedy is a Kennedy, and Rockefeller is a Kennedy, but Goldwater, praise be, is not." Months later, in the waning days of summer, Rusher returned to the pages of National Review to offer a progress report on the drive to draft Goldwater for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. In "The Draft-Goldwater Drive: A Progress Report," the author seemed upbeat, and his optimism stemmed at least in part from the uniqueness of his campaign. He

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acknowledges that "warnings are heard" that his quest would be hindered by peaking prematurely, but he dismisses such admonitions as based on previous electoral models. Citing specific examples of what his crusade is unlike, Rusher segues into a populist pep talk. According to Rusher, his then in-progress draft-Goldwater drive differed from those designed for Kennedy in 1960, Eisenhower in 1952 and Dewey in 1948 in crucial ways. Rusher's nemeses in the press, especially "great journalistic organs of national opinion" such as and Time, had been supportive of Eisenhower and Dewey and "to say the least intrigued by" the prospect of a Kennedy candidacy. By contrast, Rusher recognizes few exceptions to a press hostile to Goldwater and the conservative perspective he represents. Major business interests of the East, who Rusher claims had long lorded a de facto veto power over potential GOP nominees, were to the author another entrenched Eastern institution hostile to the candidacy of the Western conservative Goldwater. To overcome these old guard hardliners, Rusher asserts that Goldwater "must be borne on the crest of a really massive wave of public sentiment—and the generation of such a wave must begin now." Only populist, conservative fervor could rattle the ensconced Eastern elites, nominate Goldwater, and shift the power base of the party to the West and South. As he did in his "Crossroads" article, Rusher takes stock of his adversaries and their techniques. The author expresses bafflement at the tactics Rockefeller had taken to stave off Goldwater, which included identifying himself with "the ultra-Liberal position in the civil rights controversy." Rusher could not understand Rockefeller's moves because normally a front-runner necessarily leans toward the direction from which he is losing support. However, instead of shoring up backers from the right wing of the party, who Rusher describes as moving toward Goldwater in droves, Rusher reads Rockefeller as isolating himself on the left flank. He also was sure that Rockefeller sensed the precarious situation he and other liberal Republicans found themselves in due to the fact that a that included the South could defeat Kennedy and take control of the government. Such a realization could explain another of Rockefeller's staggering maneuvers: "the decision to lead the attempt by the more irresponsible Liberals to smear the Goldwater drive as based on an 'extremist' bid to 'subvert the Republican Party' and turn it into 'a party of racism.'" Rusher interpreted this "demagogy" as an indication of the depths Rockefeller and his ilk, "Liberals—both those who call themselves Republicans and those who merely order the GOP around without actually joining it," would stoop as they prepared for a fight to the bitter end against Goldwater. Rusher rhetorically asks his readers if there is anything wrong with the GOP making a bid for the passionately conservative New South, and he denies outright that such a bid entailed a nod in favor of segregation. He also stresses that neither major party endorsed "compulsory segregation," and that Goldwater had a long record of "personal friendliness toward Negro aspirations." Rusher's language raises questions about the stands each party took on "voluntary" segregation as well as Senator Goldwater's "political" friendliness toward Negro aspirations. In any case, Rusher applauds the South for "shaking off its crippling and self-defeating animus" caused by "the lingering animosity of the Civil War." Free of such resentment, Southerners could now eschew the Democratic Party and join the new GOP, which itself was, according to Rusher, moving toward the Southern view, "the view called Goldwater ," and fuse their energies with the rest of "that great majority of Americans who are innately conservative." As I noted above, Goldwater's showing in 1964 would raise serious questions about how "innately conservative" the "great majority of Americans" really are. For now, I will look at the printed end zone dance Rusher performed after successfully securing Goldwater's nomination to illustrate

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how strategists within the conservative movement used populist language to frame their takeover of the Republican Party. With "Suite 3505," published in the afterglow of the 1964 Republican National Convention, Rusher reveals to his National Review readers much of the behind-the-scenes intrigue that launched the Goldwater campaign and wrested control of the Republican Party from Eastern liberals and moderates. He celebrates the fact that for the first time since assuming its modern incarnation, the GOP nominated the choice of the Midwest, the West, and the South. Rusher utilizes sexually-charged language to describe the "vigorous elements emerging from the lusty West—a West that, to use the inescapable figure, has at last come of age as a dominating force in the American society" with which the future of the Party now rested. Rusher implicitly compares these virile elements with the enervated center/left vichyssoise-slurpers of the East, who for too long had dominated his party. Rusher charges that during the Eisenhower era the GOP had been controlled by an alliance of its liberal and centrist forces, which was reconfirmed on the eve of the 1960 convention when Nixon ceded platform planks to Rockefeller in the so-called "Treaty of Fifth Avenue." Rusher notes that Goldwater quickly denounced the pact as "a domestic Munich" (appeasement!). Elizabeth Drew refers to the deal as the "Compact of Fifth Avenue" and states that the agreement focused on an increase in spending on national defense and a pledge to enforce civil rights (16-17). Another Nixon biographer, Conrad Black, argues that the meeting was anything but a series of Nixon concessions. The presumptive nominee actually rejected Rockefeller's plan for mandatory medical coverage and "binding arbitration in labor disputes," and he also talked the Governor into more delicately-worded language on the national defense issue. Black claims that Rockefeller leaked details of the plan to the media and framed it as a capitulation by Nixon (396-97). Perlstein eschews the details of the pact in favor of the resentment Nixon felt when the convention that should have been his coronation was "interrupted by an emergency flight to so that the richest and most arrogant man in the world, Nelson Rockefeller, could dictate to him a rewrite of the Republican platform in exchange for his support" (50). Rockefeller was a Republican Franklin, and however much the Right may have distrusted Nixon's ideological credentials, they shared a disdain for this man who epitomized the Eastern elite. And whether one calls the Fifth Avenue agreement a treaty or a compact, or sees Nixon as holding firm or capitulating, Kennedy's victory signaled that a changing of the guard was nigh. Rusher notes in "3505" that one of the last of the (Ohioan Robert) Taft bloc died a month after Kennedy's inauguration, and the old Dewey – another dapper liberal Republican New York Governor – machine had all but run out of steam. It was during Kennedy's first summer as president that a group of young, conservative Republicans first started conversing about the crossroads at which their party found itself. Whether elected or unelected, they all shared a common conviction that the GOP had to take a rightward, more conservative path "away from the aggressive Liberalism of Rockefeller, away from the calculated and empty platitudes of Nixon, and toward the conservative principles and personalities which had begun to make themselves felt on the national scene in the latter half of the 1950s." They had their first official meeting in October of 1961, and in February of 1962 they secured a modest suite (3505) in midtown Manhattan. In a burst of populist sentiment, Rusher contrasts their tiny office with the extravagant five-story town house near Fifth Avenue from which Governor Rockefeller and his "well-paid legion of speech-writers, researchers, advance men and big-time political operators" were hatching his bid. Their own economical suite would

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have caused these fatcats, Rusher imagines, "mirth." The committee also had a populist disdain for the liberals in the press, who they knew would denounce the committee as "ill-timed, reactionary and just generally malodorous." Rusher notes that a year later, when news of the committee's existence broke, that is precisely what they did. In December 1962, twenty-four hours after the committee met in Chicago, gave his viewers a tour of where the group of "55 Goldwater supporters" had "met in secret" to plot their candidate's nomination. Rusher cites the New York Herald Tribune as especially upset, and quotes the paper as declaring that neither the committee's "plotting to promote Senator Goldwater for the Presidential candidacy nor the conspiracy to block Governor Rockefeller contributes to the health or harmony of the party." The Tribune also accused the conservatives of being guilty of, as Rusher predicted, "bad timing," plus "narrow motives and poor politics." But conservatism abides. And, despite setbacks such as scarce funding and overt discouragement from Senator Goldwater himself, the committee managed to start a draft Goldwater movement that picked up so much steam that the Senator actually declared his candidacy on January 3, 1964 and got himself nominated later that July. Rusher concludes by defining his article as a memorial to the "faceless committee that in 1961 and 1962 greased the track for the first conservative express train in modern American history." A little over ten years later, in his The Making of the New Majority Party, Rusher argues that any chance Goldwater had of winning the general election with "much the same geographic and ideological components" that had secured his intra-party victory died with President Kennedy in Dallas. To say the least, the populist angle had been worn down by JFK's good old boy successor: "Goldwater the Arizonan would now face, not John Kennedy, of Massachusetts and Harvard and the international Jet Set, but Johnson, the homespun Texan, from the banks of the Pedernales" (47). The author adds that segments of the Democratic alliance who might have strayed from the "young and glittering Irish millionaire from Massachusetts" – namely Southerners, blue-collar laborers, and sun- farmers – felt perfectly comfortable with the new president. These demographics, particularly Southerners and blue-collar workers, would lose their comfort with Johnson and welcome appeals from George Wallace and Richard Nixon four years later. As for 1964, Rusher laments how "the 1964-model Johnson" won the newest elements of the conservative coalition, such as the states bordering the North and South, the fastest growing states of the Southwest, and the mountain and Western states. Rusher notes that in addition to Goldwater's own home state, the Arizona Senator carried only Alabama, , , Mississippi and (48). Looking at these five states from the Deep South, one notices that the race issue is absent from Rusher's analysis. Mason states that an organizer of the Citizens' Council movement, a racist organization, said that even though they did not like Goldwater, they "took" four states for him to show their appreciation for his voting against the Civil Rights Act. Add to that Johnson's remark to an aid after the signing: "I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party for your life time and mine" (13). Drew tells a simpler version of the story in which the president reportedly muttered "There goes the South" (20). There goes the South, indeed. The candidacy of George Wallace in 1968 would complicate this transition, but Rusher was correct in noting that the South was definitely in play nationally, and it had a stronger voice than ever inside the GOP. Looking back on 1964, Rusher celebrates the fact that Goldwater's nomination demonstrated that a Republican candidate no longer needed the support of Massachusetts, , or New York (especially New York Governors suffering, you may recall, from "the civil rights hysterics"). Standard-bearers of the

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newly refurbished Republican brand need not even have to rely on Wall Street, for there were new concentrations of financial powers out West, such as in Houston and Los Angeles, willing to back conservative politicians. Most importantly, GOP candidates no longer had to lean liberal, or attempt to please liberals, to win over a Republican convention (49). The base of the party from 1964 on was conservative, and to win them over, an aspiring nominee had to run to the right. The question was whether that rightward path led to a new majority. Putting economic concerns aside for the moment, the nation did seem to be veering toward .

Permissiveness, Anxiety, and The Social Issue Since the Republicans staged a major comeback in 1966, and since they won each of the next five presidential elections save for 's 1976 squeaker against , who never recovered from pardoning Nixon, it is safe to say that the Democrats and their New Deal coalition peaked in 1964. Mason cites many factors that contributed to the erosion of support for the Democrats, including the exacerbation of racial tensions stemming from urban riots that followed civil rights victories. (Perlstein builds his backlash narrative on the fact that President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August the 6th, and the Los Angeles riots of that year started five nights later (9).) Other influences Mason lists include the calamitous , overreaches in the Great Society program, and fresh examples of the decline in morals Goldwater railed against during his run for the presidency. He cites one writer who argues that many citizens, jarred by scenes from college campuses and hippie enclaves such as Haight Ashbury, began to reevaluate Goldwater's traditionalist values that they had found old fashioned just a few years before (15, 21). Newsweek attempted in 1967 to create a snapshot of American values in a state of flux in a special report entitled "Anything Goes: Taboos in Twilight." Declaring outright that "the old taboos are dead and dying," the report heralds the arrival of a new, "more permissive society." This word, permissive, and variations such as permissiveness, appears to be the one that writers and politicians settled on to encapsulate the new world that rose up from the ashes of the supposedly uptight, buttoned-down 1950s. Newsweek pinpoints the vanguard of this new era in creative fields, from film, literature, and art to fashion, pop songs, and . These realms of cultural output purportedly reflected "a society in transition, a society that has lost its consensus." Most of the issues seem to have revolved around sex—premarital sex, clerical celibacy, sex education, and birth control—and other issues at least peripherally related to sex, including "standards of conduct, language and manners, and what can be seen and heard." As is the wont of such outlets, Newsweek managed to distill this complicated and messy set of issues into two neat sides. These sides, not surprisingly, reflect the division between elite and common people: artists and writers celebrate their emancipation from stringent and hypocritical Victorianism, while scores of everyday Americans find themselves confounded and disturbed by the rapidity with which traditional restrictions have subsided. One social commentator inevitably interpreted the rise of permissiveness as a sign of a decadent society in decline analogous to the fall of the Roman Empire; a theater critic, on the other hand, just as inevitably saw in the changing morality a realization of what real morality is all about: "how we behave toward each other, not how much of our bodies we happen to display." Such bodily displays are said to have occurred as a response to greater changes in society. According to writer Norman Mailer, theirs is a time "divorced from the past" with no tradition, "a time when our nervous systems are being remade." Newsweek also quotes painters, playwrights, and dancers who utilize nudity and eroticism in their struggle to assert their

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humanity in an increasingly dehumanized, high-tech, and commercial society. For them, the body is a mode of expression as well as a statement unto itself. An increasingly permissive society therefore allows artists and consumers to engage in a grownup discussion of what it means to be human in such a technological age. While some writers saw these changes as "more Babylonian than Babylon itself," others saw America growing into a kind of cultural adulthood ready to face and accept sex. Whether good or bad, Newsweek presents the changes as coming alliteratively and quickly. The "revolution in manners and morals" has "produced a climate of candor," and the cultural situation has "changed more dramatically in the past year than in the preceding 50." This so-called climate of candor is said to have paved the way for franker sex-education courses while weakening formerly powerful moral guardians. The report lists a slew of films that raked in the dollars despite the of the 's Legion of Decency, and a couple of others that forced Hollywood to revise its own Production Code. District attorneys who could seize pornography feel little pressure from their community to do so, Catholics increasingly ignore the Vatican's dictates on birth control, and families have turned into a battleground of generational perspectives on values. The article stresses the role of the new generation in the moral revolution at hand, and it offers quotations from the Rolling Stones— from one of their songs and one of their court transcripts. The special report does not offer any definitive conclusion, but it does stress the confusion and anxiety elicited by the evolving moral environment. And although he is not mentioned in the report, we can assume that Richard Nixon was picking up on such feelings and figuring out how to articulate them for his constituency while Congress itself struggled with how to deal with the issue. As of the article's publication, twenty-three bills had been introduced dealing with obscenity. One of those established a Presidential commission on obscenity and pornography, the results of which I will discuss in another section below. For now, let me turn my attention to an article published in Time a year and a half later, early in the Nixon presidency, that attempted to quantify many of the nebulous moral issues raised by Newsweek. What "Changing Morality: The Two Americas" does more than anything is highlight the demographic fault line between the morally permissive and the morally conservative. The facet of the New Deal coalition ripe for the GOP plucking, the group (and not just Southerners) who gave careful consideration to George Wallace in 1968, are coming into clearer focus now. The Harris poll conducted for Time does not present its statistics in such political terms; party politics and voting trends are absent from the questions. Still, when combined with other articles and assessments of the late-60s political landscape, we see in Harris' numbers a clear indication of the strength of the Social Issue, and the formation of the blue-collar social conservative bloc. Charged with the task of illuminating the evolving American morality, Harris concludes that Americans are more permissive than they were just a few short years before. The pollster found three factors contributing to this change: alienation from traditional values, greater compassion for the plight of others, and increased affluence, specifically higher levels of mobility and education that have led to an inclination toward moral experimentation. Changes in morality are shown to be most prominent and prevalent among the upper echelons of society. Prosperous suburbanites, the college-educated, and professionals make up the forefront, and they are joined by those under thirty and "the blacks." By contrast, moral conservatives, those depicted as cleaving to traditional moral truths, tended to be small town Americans over fifty, with less education and a lower annual income. Harris concludes that in terms of morals, there are virtually two Americas.

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That said, though, lopsided majorities across every imaginable demographic category concurred that morality in America had declined over the past decade. Sixty-seven percent of the entire sample held that view, while eleven percent disagreed and asserted that moral standards had in fact risen. Those with that opinion cited the increased concern for racial equality and social justice as well as the widespread stand taken in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Those witnessing a decline pointed toward the prominence of crime, violence, sex in popular media, and an increase in materialism. Harris reports that the views of the under-thirty crowd seemed to align with those of well- educated and financially better-off white-collar workers. He cites as examples their respective views on such issues as and their increasingly liberal stances on such points of contention as abortion, homosexuality, cinematic nudity, and sexual fulfillment for unmarried women. Although Harris does not offer specific statistics detailing the opinions of the older blue- collar demographic on these controversies, the assertion at the beginning of the piece that their overall stances remain largely unchanged strongly suggests that the young and affluent were increasingly in alignment against older, working-class traditionalists, a cultural situation conducive to the rise of a values-based conservative populism. As had the Newsweek piece, this article concludes with a declaration that American morality is changing drastically. The era is described as anxious, a time when old standards of living coexist with ones that are just being established. This notion of anxiety is key, as is an unwillingness to confront or accept changes to the social order. With that idea in mind, I will now turn my attention towards Millersburg, Pennsylvania. The Saturday Evening Post published author Bil Gilbert's essay "The Great World and Millersburg" in late April 1968, in between Newsweek and Time's respective reflections on America's changing moral climate, and right in the middle of a tumultuous primary season that would produce the nomination of Richard Nixon, the death of Robert Kennedy, and a head- bashing Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Gilbert's ostensible purpose was to gauge the impact of the Vietnam War on a typical American small town, but as he notes in his opening paragraph, how one feels about the war is inextricably linked to "how one feels about being an American in the year 1968." He insists he chose Millersburg more or less randomly on the faith that it shares an essence with similar such towns across the country. Gilbert notes that the population is what it was in 1920, and speculates that Millersburg probably looks, smells and sounds as it did then, too. Most importantly, the moral environment of Millersburg was probably the same in 1968 as it was in 1920; the evolution of standards described by the major weeklies seems to have missed it. Gilbert analyzes the moral perspective of this modest and conservative small town by focusing on its residents' terminology. He recounts his conversation with a Mrs. Robert Baker, a woman active with the Veterans of Foreign Wars Auxiliary who sees the struggle in Vietnam as part of a Communistic plot to destroy America. The Communists, she asserts, "are using the war to bleed us economically, cause dissension at home, lower our moral standards, undermine our way of life." Mrs. Baker thanks goodness that these forces are not as directly involved in Millersburg; she and her fellow citizens are protected, but if they lived in Harrisburg it would be different. When Gilbert asks Mrs. Baker if Communists are a problem in Harrisburg, she explains that you cannot leave your house there without locking up as you can in Millersburg. Gilbert follows up by asking if Communists break into homes in Harrisburg, to which Mrs. Baker replies:

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Well, it is all part of the same thing. Crime, the streets being unsafe, strikes, the trouble with the colored, all this dope-taking, people leaving the churches. It is sort of a breakdown of our standards, the American way of life.

Gilbert stresses that Mrs. Baker and those who echo her sentiments are not lunatic fringe kooks, or even paranoid. He describes them as solid citizens, constructive and responsible people who are troubled by the changes they see occurring outside of Millersburg, but inside of America. To understand their perspective, Gilbert urges his readers to understand how they use language. Communist is a symbol, "a catchall word," that applies to actual economic and philosophical communists, to people who are in the party and live under communist regimes. But the term also refers to people, institutions, and forces that are hostile "to what Mrs. Baker regards as the reasonable, moral, legal, human way to live—the way people live in Millersburg." While ceding that there are forces hostile to Millersburg and what it means (from Sinclair Lewis to The Black Panthers), and other less personal forces that put such places in peril (freeways and housing developments), Gilbert is taken aback by those residents who at least partially agree that their town is under siege by hostile forces. Gilbert's work offers a hint to how many small town Americans might have read Newsweek and Time's report on the changing morality, how they might have perceived the young, affluent, well-educated urban liberals steering their nation away from the reasonable, moral, legal, and human way to live. When Gilbert does get around to discussing the war, he finds few willing to engage the topic with any degree of passion. Gilbert states that the subject of war protesters, by contrast, infuriates the locals. Focusing again on residents' use of language, the author notes that war protester is synonymous with hippie. While communist is the generic word for hostile people and forces, these people and forces are personified by the hippie, who is also probably a communist. The image is of a young, hairy person with needle marks on his arms wearing a blanket and flowers. The hippie eschews God, family, and , and rejects Bing Crosby and Bart Starr. Hippies are a kind of modern pied-piper, and the residents of Millersburg fear for their children. The hippie attacks mythic America, and by extension he attacks Millersburg. In one way or another, Gilbert claims, residents claimed that lives, and he lives best in America's Millersburgs, which is to say, in small rural towns, in the free-enterprise system, in Protestant churches that adhere to scripture, and in institutions such as the Constitution and the police. In short, Uncle Sam is duking it out with the hippie, and Millersburg is awfully uneasy about who will prevail. Many issues raised in the Gilbert piece anticipate the central thesis of The Real Majority by Scammon and Wattenberg. A year before the 1968 election, Scammon countered the claim that the youth and Negro votes would determine the identity of the next president. Scammon told Time in "Shibboleth Smasher" that "the typical American voter of 1968 will be un-young, un- poor and un-black." A year after the election, he and his partner expanded on that idea while defining The Social Issue in The Real Majority, which I touched on in my introduction but will discuss in more detail here. According to the authors, Americans for several decades had voted along the lines of economic, or "bread-and-butter," issues. Now, in addition to economic considerations,

Americans are apparently beginning to array themselves politically along the axes of certain social situations as well. These situations have been described variously as law and order, backlash, antiyouth, malaise, change, or alienation. These situations, we

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believe, constitute a new and potent political issue. We call it the Social Issue, and in our definition, it includes all these facets—and much more. (20)

As the title suggests, the authors' concern is with the majority of the voters in America; these voters – in addition to being unyoung, unpoor, and unblack, a point they reiterate throughout the book – are "middle-aged, middle-class, [and] middle-minded" (21). In other words, as their jack- hammering of the term "middle" makes clear, the authors assert Middle America to be the Real Majority. Scammon and Wattenberg then discuss various ways to court this vast, moderate middle who are worried about crime, youth and social upheaval, and extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. The authors present Barry Goldwater as a prime example of an extreme right candidate. The authors see his candidacy as unique in that while most major party contenders make their way towards the center, Goldwater ran headlong to the right. Scammon and Wattenberg are careful to use the term perceived when discussing Goldwater as an extremist, as in "As perceived by tens of millions of Americans, Senator Goldwater was that worst of all political types: an extremist" and "As so perceived, he sought to wreck Social Security, to sell TVA, and to put the decision to use nuclear weapons in the hands of field commanders in Vietnam" (36). Goldwater lost so spectacularly because, despite whatever ideologically conservative notions the average American may espouse, functionally he or she accepts that government has a role to play in the maintenance of a social safety net, public utilities, and keeping control of nuclear weapons in the hands of civilian leaders. On the other hand, they credit Senator Goldwater with anticipating the rise of the Social Issue, and pinpoint his campaign as the first to touch its "raw nerve ending" (37). The gains he made with voters on crime, for example, began on the night he accepted the nomination of his party. During his address, Goldwater called attention to violent streets, aimless youths, anxious old people, and a general feeling of despair. He also described a "growing menace" to personal safety, and argued that the foundational purpose of government is to ensure "security from domestic violence," and that any government that fails in this purpose cannot expect the loyalty of its citizens (37). When Scammon and Wattenberg break down the Social Issue into its component parts and explain each one, crime tops the list. They cite FBI data indicating that "offenses against persons" – violent crime such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault – increased by 106 percent from 1960 to 1968 (40). The authors argue that such crimes are committed by young people in disproportionate numbers, and the number of people aged fifteen to nineteen had doubled from 1953 to 1968 (40-41). They acknowledge, though, that victims tend to reject such analytical explanations in favor of firearms, police protection, and politicians promising to crack down on violent hooliganism (41). I will discuss below the claim that liberal politicians during this era tended to be tone deaf on crime. The next element is race, another issue I will address in more detail below when I talk about Nixon and the South. Of course this matter has a great deal to do with the struggle for civil rights and integration, and the question of whether or not it is mixed up in the mind of the voter with the crime problem was an angrily contested point. The authors take liberals to task for their "incredible ideological verbiage," Scammon and Wattenberg's description of the liberal assertion that "law and order" is "a code word for racism" (168). (This is probably a good point to note that both men wrote as Democrats, and Mr. Wattenberg served the LBJ White House as a speechwriter.) They assert that race and crime is a phony linkup, and blacks have nothing to do

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with the causes of the other elements of the Social Issue (285). Furthermore, they note that black leaders have been staunch advocates of getting tough on crime. For example, the Harlem branch of the NAACP during the 1960s endorsed a plan that would see muggers sentenced to a minimum of five years, dope pushers sentenced to a minimum of ten, and murderers sentenced to a minimum of thirty with no time off for good behavior (234). They make a strong point that the law and order platform of the NAACP is not an excuse to lock up blacks, but a necessity in establishing and preserving safe streets and neighborhoods. The authors go so far as to contend that, in essence, blacks are part of white Middle America, they are part of the "plain people," the "forgotten Americans," and even the Silent Majority (240). When I analyze John Updike's novel Rabbit Redux in Chapter 2, I will revisit this discussion of the relationship of African Americans to this notion of Middle America. The authors contend that the next part of the social issue, urban riots, played a role in conjoining lawlessness and race in the minds of voters, and here the role of television cannot be ignored. Perlstein opens his depiction of the era by describing the impact of the microwave signal, which enabled the media to broadcast the Watts riots of 1965 live from a helicopter. Scammon and Wattenberg list the Watts riots, as well as the Harlem conflagration (1964), Chicago (1966), Newark and (1967), and the one hundred-plus cities that had outbreaks after the assassination of Martin Luther King the following spring (42). The authors describe the voters as scared and angry, and I would add that, as in the case of crime statistics, impatient toward sociological analyses that explain the root cause of such flair-ups. This was a mood favorable to conservatives and their simpler narrative explaining what needed to be done about crime. Another component of the Social Issue the authors list is "kidlash," that is, hostility toward kids who favor long hair and short , foul language and drugs, a lack of respect for authority, and rebellion on college campuses against administrations and their offices. Scammon and Wattenberg also include values as part of the Social Issue, specifically sex: the explosion of pornography, increasingly permissive moral standards, issues of celibacy and the priesthood, and sex education. Add to that the changing American mythology, in which the morose "antihero" – unconcerned with God, country or family – has replaced the hard-working, true-believing family man as the center of the American story. Finally, and this hearkens back to Millersburg, we have the war protester, the scruffy youths burning flags and draft cards and jeering the president. Each of these components overlap with and bleed into the others, and they each exist in the mind of Middle America as elements of "the more personally frightening aspects of disruptive social change" (42-43). Crime and a sense of lawlessness was definitely at the forefront, though, and the authors highlight the Gallup Poll published on February 28, 1968 to make their case (94). That survey showed that for the first time since such polling began, crime and lawlessness (including riots, looting, and juvenile delinquency) topped the list of American domestic concerns. The poll also indicated that 63 percent of respondents thought that the courts did not deal with criminals harshly enough (compared to 48 percent in 1965), while only 19 percent thought they dealt with them "about right" (compared to 34 percent three years before). The timing of the publication of the results of this survey could not have been worse for Democrats in general and President Johnson in particular, for they arrived one day ahead of the Kerner Commission Report, which blamed the riots and inner city crime rates on oppressive white racism and called on white society to make the sacrifices necessary to rectify centuries of historical injustices. I will discuss this report in beginning of Chapter 2.

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Yahoo Populism and the Building of a New Majority Anxiety wrought by the Social Issue, especially crime, brings us back briefly to Jeffrey Hart and The Making of the American Conservative Mind. Hart was working as a speechwriter for Nixon during this time, and he actually crafted one of Nixon's famous "law and order" addresses that sought simultaneously to draw Wallace supporters and put daylight between Nixon and the Alabama Governor (201). Hart describes Nixon's strategy as being aimed squarely at "moderate Democrats, especially blue-collar and ethnic voters exasperated by riots and neighborhood-busting judges" (199). Hart adds that he did not know strategist Kevin Phillips at the time, who was holed up in New York shaping Nixon's campaign strategy with charts and memos based on his encyclopedic knowledge of the history, ethnicity, and other such pertinent facts of every county in the United States (201). Such addresses and strategies were obviously based on the Social Issue, and they smacked of cultural populism. In the spring of 1968, a Phillips memo entitled "Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority" was being passed among Nixon's strategists. It stressed the importance of focusing on people's resentments in winning elections. Phillips also explained that the New Deal coalition was built on a foundation of resentment toward economic elites; the new elite, by contrast, was cultural rather than economic. Phillips argued that this elite "make their money out of plans, ideas, communication, social upheaval, happenings, excitement" while making "the great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish mass of Americans from Maine to Hawaii" existentially uneasy (Perlstein 277). We can gather from Phillips' tone that such a cultural elite would publish the Kerner Commission report and lecture white America on their responsibility for the recent spate of lawlessness, and that they would demand higher taxes, sacrifices, and compassion for perpetrators who should simply be locked in jail. Later that summer in Miami, the RNC would feature John Wayne, who proudly told his audience that he would be teaching his baby daughter values that "an articulate few are now saying are old-fashioned" (296). Wayne neglected to tell his adoring listeners that this daughter was the product of his third marriage, the other two having ended in divorce (Greenwald 30). He also failed to mention that he had worked tirelessly to avoid being drafted during the second world war (15, 21-22). Despite his own war record, John Wayne (born Marion Morrison) frequently denounced those who avoided the Vietnam draft as "cowards," "traitors," and "Communists" (28). But details be damned, there were an "articulate few," a cultural elite, to denigrate. Native New Yorker Phillips admitted later that "Wayne might sound bad to people in New York, but he sounds great to the schmucks we're trying to through John Wayne. The people down there among the Yahoo Belt" (Perlstein 296). And we all know that schmucks and yahoos are not much for details, such as the inherent dissonance of serial adulterers extolling traditional values or the cycle of poverty leading to crime and violence. Later in his book, Hart describes tensions at National Review that likely reflected tensions in the conservative movement as a whole, the tension between the quest for a new majority and elite sensibilities. According to Hart, the magazine

articulated an aristocratic conservatism, however the result might or might not appeal to Joe Six-Pack and NASCAR fans. National Review did not speak to them, and its newly fashioned elite cohort would be uncomfortable in a regime dominated by people like them, which Rusher's projected New Majority regime apparently promised, or threatened. (250)

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Hart continues by quoting Rusher, who describes himself as having a Midwestern cultural background and being predisposed to exhibit hostility toward "things Eastern." Rusher's populist leanings put him in alliance with upstate New York against and national factions against Rockefeller. According to Rusher via Hart, his sensibility made Southern and Western- based coalitions against the elite East "both familiar and thoroughly congenial" to him. These tendencies put Rusher in alignment with Phillips, who was, as Hart describes him, "another theoretician of such populist politics" (250). By 1975, the relationship between the populist and elite wings of the conservative movement was rocky. Rusher was publishing The Making of the New Majority Party, which sought to replace the Republican Party with the Independence Party, a staunchly conservative vision based on an alliance between affluent economic conservatives and working-class social conservatives. On the other side of the spectrum, National Review was making moves that, as Hart puts it, "might certainly be seen as a highbrow rejection of Yahoo populism." Such moves included having a highfalutin British conservative philosopher give an esoteric and complex address to kick off a series of events celebrating the magazine's twentieth anniversary (251). Of course, Ronald Reagan would do much to heal this rift in 1980 and 1984 with his "Reagan Democrats." My main point is that the major national parties in the United States consist of uneasy and tenuous alliances of disparate factions, and any party that achieves majority status must necessarily rely on some oddly constructed coalitions. As an example I return now to May of 1968, just days after Nixon's policy paper on crime, to his radio address entitled "A New Alignment for American Unity." Nixon began his address by stating that historians recognize most great political shifts long after they happened, not while they occur. He cited as examples the transition into the era of Jacksonian Democracy, the death of the Whigs and subsequent birth of the Republican Party, and "35 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt assembled a Democratic coalition of organized labor, minority groups and the 'solid' South." Unlike those electoral watersheds, Nixon argued for the recognition of "this new alignment that has been gathering together" to shape the political scene for the last third of the century. Nixon claimed that the new alignment already comprised a new majority, and that it would influence all Americans for generations whether or not they were a part of it. In contrast to previous majorities, which were groups of power blocs – such as labor, minorities, and the South – Nixon claimed this new alignment to be based on "an alliance of ideas." He asserted that men and women across demographic backgrounds were all coming to the same conclusions. Many belonged to the blocs that formed the old coalitions, but they were coming to think independently. The former vice president presented an image of diverse people autonomously pondering the direction of the nation and all coming to the same basic conclusions. These conclusions, the similarity of their ideas, formed the basis of the alliance rather than some tangible interest, which he suggested would cut down on infighting: "Their very diversity of background provides a basis for a new unity for America." The diversity of backgrounds, according to Nixon, indicated the strength of these fundamental ideas. According to Nixon, traditional Republicans comprised the most visible group in the new alignment, and their "good sense" philosophies were its "well-spring." Nixon described both liberals and conservatives in the party voicing the conclusion that "this nation has become great not by what government has done for people but by what people have done for themselves." They also recognized that as government becomes more centralized and domineering, the

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individual experiences less personal freedom. Nixon asserted that these ideas were becoming increasingly appealing to Democrats and Independents. The next group in the new alignment, the New Liberal, was said to be "saying much the same thing in a different form." Nixon read in the New Liberal's call for "participatory democracy" a system in which the people play a vital role in the political order, and that order functions close to the people who are governed. Nixon contended this should translate into a demand for "more personal freedom and less government domination." He also discussed the history of the word liberal. According to Nixon, the term a century ago described a person who was against overbearing governmental authority, a person who put personal liberty over state decrees. Recently, however, liberal had evolved to mean "the dependence on federal action to meet people's needs." Nixon argued that the term was likely to return to its original meaning, which stressed individual liberty. This liberty would include a caveat that "will see that a key role of government is to provide incentives for the free enterprise system to accept more social responsibility." This was Nixon thinking dialectally, even though he would never call it that. Whether a synthesis or a middle path, this proposed third phase of liberalism stressed the individual while acknowledging a role for government. Of course the role included providing incentives rather than enforcing regulations. Still, the notion of the free enterprise system welcoming social responsibility suggested a step away from staunch , and the endorsement of any role for government in this realm signified less than total acquiescence with the doctrinaire conservatism of a Goldwater and Rusher. In addition to stressing the difference between the New Liberal and the New Deal Liberal, Nixon also emphasized the difference between the New Liberal and the New Left. Nixon described the New Left as comprised of "extremists" who resented processes that allowed for incremental change, such as the act of voting. In essence, Nixon articulated the difference as working within the existing system to enact change versus tearing it down in order to build a new one, "shaking society to its foundations, leading us to anarchy." He saw the New Left as having had merely a passion, while the New Liberal had a program, a difference he further described as "a choice between getting something off your chest or getting something done." Nixon stressed that progress and order were inextricably linked, an idea he saw the New Liberal embracing and the New Left rejecting. I read the portion of Nixon's address dealing with the so-called New Liberal as the candidate defining and staking out the middle ground. By recognizing a (limited) role for government in the free enterprise system, he alienated the far right of the political spectrum and catered to the liberal and conservative impulses that coexist in people, a rhetorical move that recalls my "ideologically conservative" and "operationally liberal" discussion from above. On the other side, Nixon marginalized the extreme left with one hand while drawing in liberals with the other. He recognized the call for change while stressing the need for order. However, since Nixon limited government intervention to offering incentives and set the rate of change at incremental, he actually redefined the center. That is to say, in the context of the New Deal, the Great Society, Civil Rights, war protests, and changing codes of morality, candidate Nixon presented himself as a reasonable moderate by moving the whole of the political center rightward. After all, a fundamental idea holding this new majority together was less government and less social upheaval. Nixon also cited the New South as an important voice of the new alignment. Echoing Rusher's "Crossroads for the GOP," the candidate described a region free of "automatic voting habits and a declining economy" no longer ensnared by "old habits or old grievances or the old

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racist appeals." He depicted this new South as forging ahead with industrialization and private enterprise, ready to take its place on the national stage. He presented the South as being in political flux, emerging from the era of one-party rule and reinterpreting the old states' rights principles. In what should perhaps be followed with an exclamation point, Nixon argued that the fourth voice in the new alignment was that of the black militant. Nixon envisioned a gulf emerging between these new black leaders and "the doctrinaire welfarist." Nixon put forth a vision of new black leadership that extolled notions of "dignity," "ownership," and "pride" rather than "handouts" or "welfare." Nixon asserted that these leaders wanted to be participants rather than recipients, and proposed that Americans should respond to their demands for "a share of American opportunity, for a legitimate role in private enterprise." Looking through The Autobiography of , it becomes clear that Nixon had a point. Reflecting on the 1964 election, Malcolm X claims "'conservatism' in America's politics means 'Let's keep the niggers in their place.' And 'liberalism' means 'let's keep the knee-grows in their place—but tell them we'll treat them a little better; let's fool them more, with more promises'" (380-81). The key difference between the two stances, according to Malcolm X, was the level of honesty. He actually admired Goldwater for being, as he read him, overtly against blacks rather than "whispering to racists and smiling at integrationists" (381). He contends that blacks have always done better when they have seen the system that was "outright against them." By contrast—and this reflects Nixon's assertions about welfare—"under the steady lullabies sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar" (381). In harsher language, Malcolm X describes the black man as economically sick, a consumer who gets less than his share and a producer who gives the least. "The black American today shows us the perfect parasite image—the black tick under the delusion that he is progressing because he rides on the udder of the fat, three-stomached cow that is white America" (320). As examples, Malcolm X describes the three billion dollars blacks spent on automobiles the previous year despite the lack of but a handful of black-owned dealerships. He also laments the fact that New York City, then with over a million black residents, had less than twenty black- owned businesses employing over ten people. After his break with the Nation of Islam, which also staunchly believed in the importance of black-owned businesses, Malcolm X advocated a version of black that would reject white money because "the black man has got to help himself" (384). Before his days in the Nation, he had grown up in a household that advocated the teachings of Marcus Garvey that sought to instill racial dignity, the motivation "and the confidence that the black race needs today to get up off its knees, and to get on its feet, and get rid of its scars, and to take a stand for itself" (382). So Nixon was partially correct in his assertions about "the black militant." In the trajectory of African American political voices from Marcus Garvey through to the Nation of Islam and an independent Malcolm X, the calls for black participation in free enterprise is not new. These businesses would have been more separate than Nixon implied; they were part of the philosophy of , which was far from integrationist. With that in mind, though, this philosophy did reject welfare as undignified and as a hindrance to blacks rising independently. The idea is that equality would come only after African Americans had picked themselves up and stood on their own. A hand up from whites would have reinforced the unequal nature of the black/white dynamic. It is interesting to think about the extent to which black nationalism extolled a bootstrap, free market ethos that overlapped with traditional GOP talking points. One must imagine that

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even with this in common, though, it would have been difficult for black militants to pull the lever for the Republican Party. And one should also take into consideration the probability that Nixon cynically sought to drive a wedge into an increasingly solid Democratic bloc. Still, even with all of that in mind, Nixon was clearly paying attention to some voices in black America, and at least somebody in his camp might even have read Malcolm X's autobiography. Nixon deserves some credit for realizing points of overlap between black power and doctrinal Republicanism, and for treating black America as multifaceted rather than as a monolithic interest group with a unitary point of view. The fifth and final "element" (not a voice, for reasons that will become obvious) in the new alignment—"a non-voice, if you will"—was the silent center. We can recognize this "Silent Center" as the rhetorical missing link between the "Forgotten American" and the "Silent Majority." Nixon described the silent center as "the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or loudly." Despite their lack of overt noise or action, Nixon contended that the silent center was just as committed as other groups to establishing a new direction. They were, according to Nixon, willing to listen to and think through new ideas, and they favored solutions to social problems that ensured individual liberty. Most importantly, Nixon implied that a bulk of the New Deal voters were looking for a new way, "they have rejected the answers of the Thirties to the problems of today," and were looking for the type of sensible change he was offering, that is, "peaceful, orderly progress" rather than disruptive upheaval. Steering toward his conclusion, Nixon noted that Republicans, New Liberals, the new South, and black militants were "talking the same language" but their voices were "not joined in any harmonious chorus." And as you can see from this list, the silent center was not saying anything at all. Nixon claimed there was a lack of harmony on what to emphasize, but not on any question of fundamentals. Nixon also contended that the groups he enumerated did not clash in ways power blocs joined in traditional alliances used to in the past. And unlike such blocs, Nixon argued that his alignment did not seek to instill "the false unity of consensus, of the glassing over of fundamental differences, of the enforced sameness of government regimentation." Theirs was a unity of goals by individuals "who also recognize and value their own diversity." Nixon concluded by telling his audience that if they share his beliefs in the fundamental ideas he put forth, they then are part of the alignment. He also looked forward to historians citing 1968 as a watershed year in American politics, when Americans realigned and unified on new ideas to face their time of crisis. Reactions to the address varied. The New York Times offered a level recounting of the speech. The article "Nixon Discerns a New Coalition" reads as a synopsis, save for the final paragraph, in which author Donald Janson provides some context for Nixon's inclusion of black militants. He reports that Nixon had recently been advocating government and private loans to promote "black ," and he states that Roy Innis, associate national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, declared Nixon to be the only candidate who understood black aspirations. Mason, for his part, cites a New Republic review that expresses skepticism: "To us this is just silly. When the South and black militants get into the same boat we want to watch— from another boat" (28). Gary Wills, writing after the election in Nixon Agonistes, impugned Nixon's sincerity. In the final paragraphs of a chapter entitled "The Politics of Resentment," Wills asserts that the former vice president never made a sincere effort to get either the black militant or the new liberal into his coalition. Instead, "what he meant to do was throw up a protective screen around

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his actions" (71). Wills contends that the May 16 address gave him a structure within which to work: he could neutralize some opposition from the black community with notions of black enterprise without alienating other parts of the alliance, especially since the overarching theme was, as Wills reads it, "less government interference." Wills claims the speech did not, nor was it meant to, achieve any such alignment. Instead – hence "the protective screen around his actions" – Nixon worked to reap

maximum advantage from the troubles of the year, using a coolly orchestrated politics of discontent. In a low-keyed campaign, this is how he spoke to the "forgotten man" and his disquietude, to those who attended Wallace rallies, to those who feared the rallies, to all who were resentful. (71)

And resentment is key. Wills asserts that nothing at all positive unites the five groups in Nixon's proposed alignment. One might counter that his notion of "personal freedom" counts, but Wills seems to categorize that with the common note that each group shares, that is, a "resentment of government" (69). As we have seen before, the notion of resentment certainly seems to have swirled around Richard Nixon, and it seems to have been swirling around this era. His time had arrived. Nixon accepted his second nomination to lead the Republican ticket in August 1968 in Miami Beach, . In a speech transcribed by the New York Times, Nixon struck a conservative populist tone to rally the majority of Americans against forces of change. He conjured images of America enveloped in fire and smoke, Americans dying on battlefields in foreign lands, and Americans hating each other at home. Amidst the turmoil, the cacophony of the sirens in the night, and the shouting he asked his listeners to recognize the voice of "the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the nondemonstraters." With this Nixon continued his theme of the "silent center" of the primaries and tapped further into the forgotten and silent American motif that Goldwater presented as a GOP talking point with his "A Statement of Proposed Republican Principles, Programs and Objectives" in 1961. Goldwater had co-opted the phrase from FDR, and Nixon completed its evolution from its economic meaning to its contemporary Social Issue connotation. Nixon assured his listeners that these forgotten Americans were not sick, were not racist or guilty of the crime that afflicted the country. Of course Nixon's target audience and the forgotten Americans of whom he spoke were one and the same. Thus he exonerated his followers of any responsibility for the era's unrest, he refuted on their behalf claims made by liberals that their way of life perpetuated a cycle of poverty and violence, and he denied that they should make sacrifices to rectify deeply ingrained societal injustices. Nixon also described the quiet, forgotten Americans as black and white, native and foreign born, as well as young and old. This description can be read as Nixon covering himself – throwing up a protective screen, one might say – against accusations that he was addressing white society, imagining his common audience primarily as white working men, and vilifying the young (or immigrants and blacks). As with most such speeches, Nixon credited his listeners for doing the work (laboring in factories, running businesses, serving government, and providing soldiers) that propels the spirit of America, gives rise to the American Dream, and steels the American backbone. They are good, decent people who go to work, pay their taxes, and care. Furthermore, according to Nixon, they provide "the real ," a line by which Nixon defined his forgotten and quiet followers as authentic Americans and the dissenters as mere pretenders, or worse. He reassured

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his followers that America is great because they, her people, are great. He placed the blame for America's problems on the leaders of the last five years (he was careful not to impugn a martyred Kennedy) rather than the people, and encouraged them to elect a leadership to match their greatness. In an even more overt slap at Johnson and his vision of a Great Society, Nixon asserted that the nation was sick of big promises and too little action, and stated that "I do not promise the millennium in the morning. I don't promise that we can eradicate poverty and end discrimination and eliminate all danger of wars in the space of four, or even eight years." He couples this realism with a promise to take action with new, unspecific policies. I read this section of the speech as the second phase of an articulation of backlash against the Great Society programs and perhaps even those of the New Deal. On the one hand, Nixon's words can be interpreted as pragmatism replacing pie-eyed, impractical idealism. On the other, when read in the context of his having removed the burden of responsibility for poverty and violence from his listener's shoulders, his words read as the worst kind of pandering. He removed the encumbrance of shared responsibility for the plight of the nation and dismissed the goals of eradicating poverty and discrimination (although he says eradication in the space of a presidential term). His speech was more acquittal than absolution, and he thus eradicates the need for penance in the form of sacrifice (and taxes); he removes the burden of shared responsibility. As the speech continued, Nixon repeated his "New Alignment" claim that order must precede progress and was a prerequisite for both dissent and peaceful change. Nixon rode the theme of order into a discussion of the courts, which he stated had weakened the forces of against criminal elements. He also argued that judges should be committed to the cause of civil rights, but they should "recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence." We see here another instance of Nixon echoing Goldwater, who claimed four years earlier that the foundational purpose of government was to ensure "security from domestic violence." As the Gallup poll of the previous February indicated, the world had caught up with Republican talking points. And Nixon's version of the theme, particularly his recontextualization of the term civil rights in a discussion of crime, enabled him to subtly link crime and race while pandering to a white majority that perceived of themselves as oppressed. This was a rhetorical move probably unthinkable a mere four years before when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, but now, in the throes of white backlash, it seemed to be regarded as perfectly acceptable. In another recontextualization, this one another of Roosevelt's famous phrases, Nixon harkened back to the borrowed title of his position paper on criminality and asserted that he would work to end the crime wave and reestablish freedom from fear in America. He also addressed head-on the claim that "law and order is the code word for racism," claiming that his goal was justice and acknowledging that "just as we cannot have progress without order, we cannot have order without progress." Scammon and Wattenberg make an interesting case that liberal efforts to paint law and order as coded racism were ill-conceived and electorally detrimental. Still, they talk about the extent to which the strong showing in the polls by the overtly racist Wallace, especially early, were due to the Social Issue in general and law and order in particular (95). Thus Nixon's words can be interpreted as another attempt, as Hart described it, to attract those leaning toward Wallace while putting distance between himself and the Alabama governor. On the other hand, by inviting charges of race-baiting with his crass use of the term civil rights in the context of crime and following it up with his denial that calls for law and order were racially-charged, we see another example of what Perlstein described as Nixon's rhetorical jujitsu: he enticed his detractors to lunge with an accusation of racism so that he could perform

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the role of the innocent victim who wants only justice for all Americans. Nixon stirred racial animosities in his constituency while providing them with plausible denials that they felt as they did. Nixon then turned his attention to further criticizing Johnson's War on Poverty, asserting that citizens had been inundated with programs for the unemployed, cities, and poor and "we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustrations, violence and failure across the land." Nixon neatly presented as the cause of violence government programs designed to assuage poverty rather than poverty itself. He put the blame for frustration and violence on the government, and then launched into familiar GOP refrains such as America's greatness came about "not because of what government did for people, but because of what people did for themselves over 190 years in this country" and "what we need are not more millions on welfare rolls but more millions on payrolls." Nixon advocated using the free enterprise system to bring about progress, and reiterated his argument that blacks want the dignity and self-respect that a piece of the free enterprise system brings rather than government programs that perpetuate dependency. Nixon concluded by assuring his audience that "the dark long night for America is about to end," ironic words considering the fact that they were spoken six years and a day before his resignation and replacement by a man who would assure the country that "our long national nightmare is over." But the vantage point of history can be unfair to those who participated in the events, so I will now turn my attention to President Nixon's inaugural address, again transcribed by the New York Times, in which he takes a more conciliatory tone toward his predecessors. The text of Nixon's speech indicates that he believed the New Deal era to have ended with his election. He lauded the "second third of this century" as a time of achievement, and cites advances in science and technology, the broader distribution of wealth, and the increased spread of freedom to blacks as well as whites as examples. He also expressed hope and belief in American youth, and expressed pride in their being "better educated, more committed, more passionately driven by conscience than any generation in our history." This take on what were presumably young war protesters would not last, but his belief that his administration represented the first of the post-New Deal presidencies would. Nixon encourages comparison of his inauguration to Roosevelt's. He stated that whereas the crisis that gripped the nation in 1933 was material in nature, "our crisis today is in reverse," arguing the country in the late 1960s was rich in goods but "ragged in spirit." Nixon's words perfectly encapsulated the shift from economic concerns to those of the Social Issue, and how he hoped his inroads into the New Deal coalition would mark the beginning of a New Majority founded largely on social conservatism. He made an overture to his audience's "better angels," and in continuing with the distinction he made during the campaign between the quiet and silent Americans versus the shouters, he stated that "to lower our voices would be a simple thing." With that he segued into a call to move past the era of poverty programs and protests: "America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver, from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds," and he reiterated yet again his pledge to establish the order that "makes progress possible." Again signaling an era shift, Nixon described how the past third of a century saw government passing more laws, spending more money, and initiating more programs than in the entire history preceding it. While pledging to "press urgently forward" on goals of full , improved housing and education, rebuilding cities and advancing rural regions, and protecting the environment and the quality of life, he asserted that "we are approaching the limits

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of what government alone can do." He encouraged people to get involved and stressed reaching beyond government toward "the legions of the concerned and committed" so that people and government could work together to solve problems. Nixon emphasized themes of unity throughout the speech and again elicited images of waking up from "a long night of the American spirit." Magazine articles from the early days of Nixon's presidency, however, reflect alienation rather than unity and a continuation of a long, anxious night rather than optimistic wakefulness. Media and political focus at the time was shifting toward resentful working class citizens that they were coming to define as Middle America. Although they struggled economically as they had during Franklin Roosevelt's time in power, the issue did indeed seem to be largely of spirit. This is an important constituency Nixon hoped to siphon from the Democratic coalition with patriotism, social conservatism, and allusions to backlash.

"'Working Americans' Are Rediscovered" captured the resentment in the New York outer borough air with his April 1969 article "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class." He states explicitly that these are his people, and he shows disdain for the "ugly, ice-cold phrase" that is White Lower Middle Class. He hears it as a sociological term that it fails to describe the reality of the situation, which is "of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt." He asserts that saying "that magic phrase" at an cocktail party elicits grotesque, demonized images of the rabble: fat, ignorant and bigoted ethnics (the Irish, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Hungarians are listed) who hate Mayor John Lindsay and vote for George Wallace "presumably because they believe that Wallace will eventually march every black man in America to the gas chambers, sending Lindsay and the rest of the Liberal Establishment along with them." There is a lot to a name, and Hamill notes that this group is often referred to as "the ethnics" or "the blue- collar types," but "nobody calls it the Working Class anymore." Except for Hamill himself, who conspicuously calls his people that for the rest of the article. Hamill describes the working class as somewhere on the economic spectrum between the poor (the aged, sick, and unemployable women and children who subsist on welfare) and the semi-professionals and professionals who make their livings via skills acquired through their educations. "The working class earns its living with its hands or its backs," they do not receive welfare, and they live in the realms between squalor and suburban comfort. In other words, Hamill's subject is the late twentieth century version of the class that the Philadelphian Publius described in the early days of the Republic; this is the "middling sort" of the information age. Hamill interviews a lot of working class white men and explains to his readers how, as he puts it, "the information explosion has hit them." Describing the nature of television, its depthlessness and preference for the visually stimulating rather than the analytical, Hamill laments that they tend to have a superficial understanding of many issues, especially race. Since most have "only a passing acquaintance with blacks," a lot of their perceptions come from television, which leaves them with an impression that there are two types of black people:

they see blacks in terms of militants with Afros and shades, or crushed people on welfare. Television never bothers reporting about the black man who gets up in the morning, eats a fast breakfast, says goodbye to his wife and children, and rushes out to work. That is not news.

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Hamill implies that television never shows to blue-collar whites blacks who live precisely as they and their own families do. Worse, attention lavished on the urban riots has, Hamill argues, provided the white working class with "a confused, threatening stereotype of blacks that has made it almost impossible to suggest any sort of black-white working-class coalition." How could there be, after all, when there seems to be little knowledge that a black working-class even exists? Via his interviews, Hamill provides details of white workers' imagistic stereotypes of blacks. The reader can hear phrases and snippets of anecdotes such as "a million people on welfare in New York," "spades rioting in some college," and "some fat welfare bitch demanding—you know, not askin', demanding—a credit card at Korvette's…I work for a living and I can't get a credit card at Korvette's" bouncing off of tavern walls and combining into a chorus of acrimony and victimhood. This resentment toward blacks merges with rancor toward Lindsay – to whom one worker cannot relate because he "sounds like a college professor" – and the era's entrenched elite, the Liberal Establishment:

What the hell does Lindsay care about me? […] None of them politicians gives a good goddam. All they worry about is the niggers. And everything is for the niggers. The niggers get the schools. The niggers go to summer camp. The niggers get the new playgrounds. The niggers get nursery schools. And they get it all without workin'. I'm an ironworker, a connector; when I go to work in the mornin', I don't even know if I'm gonna make it back.

An important point here is that these interviewees perceive an alliance between the liberal elite architects of social programs and the poor blacks who purportedly reap the benefits of them. While the connector risks his life, he imagines blacks taking "the welfare," sitting on a stoop taking pulls from a bottle of cheap wine and discarding the empty bottle into the street. The money for this welfare comes from the ironworker's paycheck he earns risking his life—"and I'll tell ya somethin'. There's a lotta people who just ain't gonna put up with it much longer." This ominous tone permeates the article. Hamill discusses the difficulty of explaining the fact that the preponderance of those on welfare are women and children, and that black families are in trouble because Unions such as the Iron Workers' "have practically excluded blacks through most of their history." The working class white man, Hamill claims, has no more patience for explanations, especially ones that detail how taxes are being used to alleviate poverty caused by three hundred years of slavery followed by one hundred years of neglect. One man exclaimed "if I hear that 400-years-of-slavery bit one more time, I'll go out of my mind." When the issue of compensation comes up on another night, Hamill describes an Irish worker arguing that the British ruled Ireland for 700 years, hundreds of years longer than American blacks had been slaves, before asking if the British government planned on compensating him. Citing the "No Irish Need Apply" signs in America, he also asks whether the American government planned on compensating him. As I will show in the next chapter, the Kerner Commission studiously undermined the validity of the black slave and immigrant worker comparison, but it seems unlikely that this man would have bought the argument. Despite such attempts to compare their lots, Hamill found no interest in a black and white working class coalition. As one worker put it, "Why the hell should I work with spades when they are threatening to burn down my house?"

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As such quotations indicate, Hamill describes the working class white man as increasingly likely to cast himself in the role of victim. Such a man is usually a veteran of a foreign war such as Korea who returned home to discover that his GI Bill failed to cover the cost of college, so he did not go. This sore spot is rubbed raw by news reports about black members of the SEEK program, a then-recently enacted higher education program in New York state, protesting at College. These students, he learns, receive free tuition and up to 200 dollars a month to go to school. Stories such as these abound during this era: working class people watching college kids protest on campuses, throwing away an opportunity they never had. Financial difficulties such as the ones that plagued returning veterans continue into his adult, working life. Taxes and keep him from getting ahead, and as noted he perceives his tax money as going to the blacks. Hamill describes the working class man as frequently having to get a part-time, weekend job, and his wife often picks up a part-time night job during the week. , a Democratic Congressman from , describes the way in which this type of worker thinks society has failed him, and how his alienation is frequently more acute than the black man's. While the black man's life is slowly improving, a forty-year-old white worker knows that his earning potential has peaked and that the future is increasingly bleak. Carey argues that among Lindsay's many mistakes, his worst move may have been alienating the white lower middle class. Hamill asserts that an important reason for the alienation of this group of people is the belief that nobody respects them. Despite this alienation, the working-class white man, often the son of an immigrant, is fiercely patriotic. Rituals and symbols such as the Pledge of Allegiance, the Star-Spangled Banner, the American Flag and "I Am an American" Day parades are treated with religious reverence, and as Nixon said in his acceptance speech the previous summer and Publius stated in his writings two centuries before, this group provides soldiers for the wars. Hamill states that the dozens of veteran's clubs speckling working-class neighborhoods foster "an odd sort of know- nothingism." The Vietnam War had rarely to never been questioned until the previous year, "and he sees any form of antiwar protest as a denial of his own young manhood, and a form of spitting on the of the people he served with who died in his war." Hamill concludes by stressing that the white working class man is resentful and angry and looking for someone to blame. The obvious candidate is going to be the black man, who "has become the symbol of all the working-class white man's resentments." Hamill asserts that working class whites do not care if blacks get a place in his union, just so long as they do not have to give up jobs or privileges for that to happen. This point seems debatable, and I will revisit it below. Hamill stresses the virtue of fairness integral to his people, and he again advocates an alliance between white and black members of the working class. Instead of this happening, he paints an ominous picture of gun clubs and self-defense leagues forming around speculation of "real race rioting" breaking out. To Hamill, the race issue is a diversion; the real points of contention are taxes, joyless work, politicians, hypocrisy, and the degradation of the American Dream. With that in mind, he reads the 10 million votes that Wallace received – "not all of them from rednecked racists" – as a warning. Nixon seems to have read those ten million votes as both an opportunity and a warning— if he failed to seize the opportunity to address the concerns of this constituency, Wallace would threaten his chance to be reelected. Mason claims that despite the attention Nixon lavished on forgotten Americans during the campaign, it took Hamill's article to get the administration moving on the topic. Nixon is said to have circulated the article among the White House staff asking for comments, and most opined on combinations of economic distress and racial

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animosity. The postmaster general – Nixon seems to have distributed the article far and wide – noted that the resentments Hamill described could fuel further Wallace success.2 Wallace remained vague about his plans for 1972, although he continued to publish his campaign newsletter, which had as its address P.O. Box 1972 (45-47). This overlap of race and labor was made all the more complicated by the Nixon administration's implementation of the Philadelphia Plan, which Mason describes as the first federal quota-based affirmative action program. Secretary of Labor George Shultz designed the plan as a means of integrating the construction industry by setting minority workers quotas for companies with federal contracts. Since such quotas were banned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Philadelphia Plan insisted on targets for minority employment within a recommended range but never an explicitly required figure. Mason asserts that Nixon's decision to implement the plan may have been political: "Shultz pointed out that its implementation could encourage conflict between two groups essential to the Democratic coalitions—African Americans and organized labor" (53). Perlstein also describes the Plan and accentuates its wedge issue nature: "[…] it drove a wedge through the Democratic coalition at its most vulnerable joint: between blacks and hard hats" (515). According to reporter A.H. Rashkin, the typical rank and file union member was already drifting rightward out of the Democratic coalition. Rashkin begins his article, "The Working Man has become a Snob," by refuting the prevalent idea that the average American worker tends toward the progressive. In fact, he argues, the typical worker "has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country." Furthermore, he speculates that if the urban unrest were to create a surge in right-wing extremism, the majority of recruits would come from the men and women who comprise labor's rank and file. Writing in the spring of 1968, Rashkin identifies these very people as the basis of Wallace's hopes to throw the election into the House of Representatives. The emphasis on the rank and file is important here, for Rashkin argues that resolutions passed at organized labor conventions, such as those supporting Civil Rights and programs that function as part of the war on poverty, are misleading. A schism between labor leadership and its members has created a situation in which "the workers have moved so far to the right in many unions that the union leaders are left talking to themselves." After progressive resolutions are passed, the rank and file repudiate them with their Election Day votes. Rashkin cites as an example the 1965 New York Mayoral election. The city's Teamsters' Union, which had 150,000 members among the five boroughs that year, endorsed Democrat Abraham D. Beame. However, the thousands of campaign stickers designed to go on the drivers' truck bumpers ended up in the garbage. The drivers also rejected the liberal Republican candidate John Lindsay. Their choice was Conservative Party candidate (and National Review founder) William F. Buckley, and they proudly plastered his stickers on their trucks. Rashkin surmises that Buckley's "cerebral wit no doubt whizzed right past the truck jockeys," but they got the parts of his rhetoric that railed against "bureaucrats, high taxes, the growing welfare rolls and many other things they resented about their city." The author quotes a Teamster who sums up the election: "So far as our guys were concerned, every candidate except Buckley was a nigger lover."

2 Wallace garnered 13.5 percent of the vote and 46 electoral votes in 1968. He won Alabama, , Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and picked up a stray member of the electoral college (Scammon and Wattenberg 309, 321-322). 42

The race issue did seem to be a bit more complicated than such vitriol would suggest, though. Rashkin reports that laborers in mills and assembly lines are used to working alongside blacks, and even the most exclusionary of the skilled trade unions accept that anybody must be admitted provided they qualify. Still, the rank and file express concern that blacks seek preferred treatment rather than equality, which "gets oversimplified to mean that the white man is being required to step aside in favor of a Negro who can't measure up to the standards everyone else must meet." Workers express the familiar gripes about Lindsay and his concern for "those bums on relief," and they criticize what they see as too much militancy in civil rights groups: "We all had to pull ourselves up; they should do it the right way." All this leads to the conclusion, articulated by pollster Louis Harris, that union members are forming, as he put it, a "conservative anchor" on the national political scene. Professor , a liberal Democrat who would serve in the Nixon administration, states in the article that surveys of Boston union members' social beliefs indicate "a frighteningly conservative pattern." This pattern is the result of the workers feeling as though they bear the brunt of the sacrifices to rescue the poor, and that the changes wrought by integration, especially in schooling and housing, fall on their shoulders. This last theme is picked up in a Time editorial from the summer of 1969 entitled "Time to Remember 'Forgotten America.'" The essay often reads as a mere rewrite of the Hamill piece, but it lacks any intellectual nuance and the investment that Hamill obviously had in the subject matter. It is worth considering because it stands as an emblem of the herd-like media attention then being lavished on a people "nowadays referred to as the lower middle class," people who adhere to traditional values and virtues that seem to be openly mocked, people who feel ignored and outdated, people that President Nixon justifiably calls "forgotten Americans." It also exemplifies the condescending tone that much of the media took toward the white working class, which I argue inadvertently facilitated the conservative movement's vilification of liberalism. Whereas Hamill wrote with empathy, there is a sociological, or perhaps even an anthropological, distance that permeates the Time essay and gives credence to the white working class fear that they were being looked down upon by the liberal elite – in this case the liberal media elite. The objects of study, they, "live in overmortgaged, underserviced blue-collar ghettos," and most of them "still believe in God, country, the work ethic and a sexual standard that calls for at least a decent public restraint." In a climate of unsettling evolving morality, "they see themselves as the last defenders of moral authority. They also see patriotism as being under continual assault, and a telegrapher from the Northwest laments that "you're trying to teach your children one set of values and every element of life around them shows you up as a square." This patriotic squareness enables them to hold the military and police in high esteem. In a passage that indicates the extent to which Time did not quite get it, the essay puts forth the New York Time's Tom Wicker's realization during the 1968 Chicago convention kerfuffle that "these were our children in the streets and the Chicago police beat them up." Citing a Gallup poll indicating that 56 percent of respondents approved of the police's handling of the situation, Time interprets the numbers this way: "What those people meant was: 'Those were our children who were doing the beating.'" Scammon and Wattenberg had a different take. They cite a Harris poll showing that 66 percent of respondents thought that Mayor Daley used police against demonstrators appropriately, and the same percentage disagreed with the claim that war demonstrators had their right to protest unlawfully taken away from them. According to the authors, "on the one side were the elite, long-haired students. On the other, 'our children'—that is,

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the policemen […]" (161-62). The police were not "doing the beating;" to these respondents they were defending themselves against elites who demonstrated their disdain for law and order. Another source of contention for the white lower middle class is the feeling that they are carrying the heaviest burden in terms of social change, especially integration. According to Time, "almost everywhere lower-middle-class whites feel that they are being forced to pay the real price of integration while assorted social planners and liberal moralists retreat at night to their suburban fastnesses." Busing is viewed as a plan that moves their children to worse public schools while wealthy children flee to private institutions, and Time contends that domestic tranquility is impossible while "the white lower middle class remains persuaded that it is being called upon for more than its fair share of those sacrifices." It cites the Kerner Commission's claim that "white racism" is the principle cause of racial violence, and states that "up to a point, the charge is just" without explaining this qualification. The essay warns that as America acknowledges "the legitimate demands of the black revolution, it must also acknowledge the legitimate fears of the white reaction," arguing that working class good will and assistance are integral for racial calm and urban advances. Despite these concessions, the article reads patronizingly and it seems not grasp the heart of the working class discontent. For example, do workers have a point when they claim that "assorted social planners and liberal moralists" send their own children to private schools unaffected by busing policies? Were working class kids being shipped off to worse schools? These points are brushed aside as irrational: they feel that they are being forced to pay the real price of integration and remain persuaded that they are making more than their fair share of sacrifices. Another problem is the way the essay frames the race issue. Time fails to consider white working class discontent and fear as an important issue in and of itself. Instead, it advocates assuaging these fears as a means of achieving racial progress and paying for the sins of the past. By making white working class concerns secondary, and a means to another end, Time inadvertently reinforces patterns that alienate white workers and sets them up for the appeals of conservative demagogues. As Hamill did, Time argues that whites and blacks who share similar economic needs should band together and cites as an obstacle the "We made it; why can't they?" attitude of various ethnic groups. However, instead of recognizing that the media image machine has played a role in the white/black alienation, Time lapses into a finger-wagging lecture: "lower-middle- class whites need to see that their long-range interest lies not in defending the status quo but in organizing themselves to change it" before acknowledging that "the problem is how to convince white workers that social change can benefit them and not just Negroes." But since much of the workers' anxiety had come from social upheaval, it seems unlikely that they would accept more change as a viable solution. Also, Time fails to grasp the extent to which liberals, social planners, and the media were being melded into a conceptual whole known as the elite. Elite lectures about what these broke and frightened people "need to see" and open discussions of "how to convince" them epitomizes a tone-deafness missing from the conservative movement and their populist appeals. Before I get to these appeals, and Nixon's declaration of war against so-called media elites, I will first consider more media analyses of the white working class' discontent. In "'Working Americans' Are Rediscovered," 's Richard Harwood describes the effect of white working class resentment on the 1969 New York mayoral race. In his article, Harwood manages to exceed Time's distant condensation by dehumanizing his subjects. The report opens "in those vast ant heaps" of Brooklyn, Queens, and before launching into a spectacularly unflattering portrait of the race's populist hero, Mario Procaccino,

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whom Harwood describes as "a squat little man with a pencil mustache" who "rubs the sores of Middle America." Procaccino, the "Bronx Populist," at the time of the campaign was a fifty- seven year old lawyer who had won the Democratic nomination. Harwood reads Procaccino's anti-elitism as the basis of his appeal. In the outer boroughs (the vast ant heaps), "the masses swarm around him gratefully." These masses are comprised of those who "understand the bitterness that creeps into Procaccino's voice as he damns the world none of them has ever known." This unknown world consists, according to the blue-collar perspective articulated by Procaccino, of the "silk " precincts of Manhattan's East Side, Central Park poetry readings, Wall Street board rooms, and Ivy League "limousine liberals." This is the world of the incumbent, John Lindsay, who lost the Republican primary to John Marchi because of his failure to carry any borough save for Manhattan. As a result, Lindsay ran under the banner of the Liberal and Independent parties in a three-person race against Marchi and Procaccino. Harwood reads Lindsay's strength as lying with the rich and poor, especially blacks. Procaccino and Marchi were left to split the Middle, which is to say, in this context, the ethnic white working class. According to Harwood, "the Irish, the Italians and the Germans have been veering toward Republicanism in recent years." A Lindsay strategist notes that the "lower- middle class has been voting conservative since 1962." The challenge for the Democrat, whom Harwood also describes as having "no natural eloquence in his , no charisma in his manner," was to employ the language of populism to address the middle's grievances and win them back from the Right. To this end, Procaccino's stump speech updated classic populist tropes. He charged Lindsay and his "Manhattan Arrangement" with "moral arrogance" for, according to Harwood, having "commanded" racial tolerance instead of persuading people to embrace it and for having "dismissed" the feelings of the white working class, whom he depicts as working a fourth of their shifts to cover local, state, and federal taxes only to return from work to find themselves prisoners in their own homes because of the crime wave. As the phrase "limousine liberals" suggests, Procaccino also emphasized the out-of-touch elite theme, indicting "the select few" for their ignorance of such problems as the impact of inflation, "the heat and discomfort" of public transportation, and calling "our legitimate concerns for the safety and well-being of ourselves and our families prejudice and fear." Harwood notes that when Procaccino and Marchi campaigned on the crime problem during the primaries, Lindsay initially blamed their success on "built in bigotry...reaction...fear...backlash" [ellipses in original]. Reflecting Scammon and Wattenberg's claim that liberal attempts to denounce the crime issue as coded racism amounts to political suicide, Lindsay backtracked and declared in new campaign brochures that "crime is New York's number one problem." Procaccino's emphasis on crime, plus his channeling of personal grievances toward his ambitions, suggests the extent to which Nixon's political style had taken hold throughout the country. In a story that echoes Nixon's experience after his graduation from Duke Law School, Procaccino recounted his own encounter with bias:

I know about discrimination. When I got out of law school at Fordham I came down here (to Wall Street). I went into the offices of the big firms. They looked at my record—three years on the dean's list, one of the editors of the law review, and they said, "You have a good record. What's your name? How do you pronounce it?" I got the message real quick. I guess I didn't belong. I couldn't work in those beautiful buildings. I went to work for a dollar a day answering calendar calls for other lawyers.

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The candidate's story was an obvious attempt to appeal to discontented ethnic voters, and it indicates that he considered the experience of ethnic discrimination to be equivalent to racial prejudice. And like Nixon, he still harbored resentment about having been a victim of Wall Street class bias and drew on that and his outsider status to connect with his Middle American constituency. Harwood describes how this constituency has functioned as the overlooked middle child of the American socioeconomic strata, the group ignored by the media and politicians preoccupied with "upper-class discontent on the campuses" and "black rumblings in the ghetto." From there he strikes the chords that had become common since the publication of Hamill's article, including the idea of a "counter-revolution," listing various names for the group, and quoting an expert, in this case former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert C. Wood, who describes the strata as existing between the rich and poor, bearing the greatest tax burden, supplying America's soldiers, and feeling ignored by the political process. Wood adds that the upper-middle-class Establishment asks this group to do the heavy lifting of integration by making room in the factories and embracing busing programs, and he argues that resentment arose when it became obvious that the Establishment were not willing to share any of the burden. Wood explains this as the basis of Procaccino's appeal and the reason why his sharpest phrases resonate so strongly. Harwood adds the perspective of William vanden Heuvel, a wealthy, liberal attorney and former associate of Robert Kennedy, who acknowledges that "working people sense the hypocrisy of the liberals." And while their perception that everything goes to the black is a myth, "they have legitimate grievances." Like Hamill's article, Harwood's piece concludes ominously. He discusses the extent to which "law and order" and "crime in the streets" eclipses all other grievances, and he describes the formation of vigilante groups throughout all the city's boroughs and the establishment of armed "citizen's patrols" in most of its housing units. As Scammon and Wattenberg stressed, the concern with crime was particularly strong in black neighborhoods. Harwood recounts a young black man warning a police captain that he would kill the junkies in his alley himself if the police continued to fail to act and a black housewife describing neighborhood children being beaten up and robbed by junkies at school. Hamill and Time advocated a black and white alliance on working class issues, but this article indicates the crime issue was actually a strong grounds for such a pact. Time also gave considerable attention to the New York mayoral race and, as their headline put it, "The Revolt of the Average Man." The epigraph opening the article excerpts a Procaccino stump speech that hits the same themes of moonlighting and public transportation while adding that such a man has never burned his draft card or the American flag and never would. In addition to striking these familiar chords, the article highlights the striking Lindsay/Procaccino dichotomy, blatantly privileges the Liberal Establishment, and ridicules the assumed irrationality of average people. The article, in short, stands as another condescending screed that helped steer the white working class away from liberalism and toward the conservative movement. Procaccino is described as "a defiant little man who claims to speak for the angry little people." These people "have endured what they feel is a special form of outrage" that transcends taxes and inflation, deteriorating services, and struggling schools; their outrage is aimed at the Lindsay administration, "which, they feel, has ignored them in its undue preoccupation with the city's blacks and poor" (emphasis added). The piece, another Time article without a credited author, describes a "personal edge to the bitterness of Procaccino's followers." Part of this edgy

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bitterness comes from the perception that Lindsay comes from a world not accessible to them, which, in addition to the "glittering East Side," also includes discotheques, penthouse parties, and private-school accents.3 Time mentions Procaccino's use of the term "limousine liberals," for which they credit him with "a rare flash of genuine wit," and notes that Lindsay's "riposte" (a fencing term) was to tag the term "Cadillac conservatives" onto Procaccino's entourage. It seems unlikely this would have offended the Democratic candidate. According to the article, he insists on being called Mario rather than Mr. Procaccino, tends toward the "gooey delivery and overly simple ides," accentuates the ethnic in speech and mannerisms, and tells crowds that he is "not pretty." His lack of prettiness seems to have served him well rhetorically in his campaign against Mayor Lindsay and, as Time puts it, "the Beautiful People." Lindsay, "a visible, courageous chief executive who is always willing to put his prestige on the line for what he believes is right," and his crowd represent "the aristocratic remnant in local politics." Lindsay is also described as "tall, handsome, flat-bellied, articulate with tongue and pen, popular with academics, big businessmen and show people as well as students and black slum residents." With the exception of big businessmen, this core of Lindsay's forces, especially performers, academics and students, and poor African Americans, which Time summarizes as "an alliance of patricians and restive blacks—the New Establishment in urban America," encapsulates the liberalism from which the middling white working class came to feel estranged. This liberal "New Establishment" embodies the target against which a populist movement comprised of working social conservatives focused their resentment, the resentment upon which Nixon hoped to build his New Majority. Time, in fact, notes that the era has shifted from the likes of Lindsay toward Richard Nixon, who it argues sensed the previous year that Middle America had felt itself the victim of exceedingly rapid change and concessions to blacks. Politicians such as Procaccino and Marchi are described as riding similar waves, knowing "that large segments of the working class and middle class are weary of idealistic reformers who somehow manage to cast the ordinary white man in the fall guy's role," and forget, as Marchi puts it, "that there are many poor ." This discontent has weakened traditional – read "New Deal" – alliances: "unions and intellectual liberals are no longer at with each other." And if this does not sound a lot like something one would have heard at a Nixon strategy meeting, consider that the title of Marchi's kickoff speech was "The Forgotten New Yorker." Not surprisingly, Lindsay's stint as vice-chairman of the Kerner Commission became a talking point during the campaign, as did his attempt in 1966 to create a civilian review board to consider complaints of . The review board was defeated in a referendum, and neither this stance nor his role in crafting the Kerner report did much to endear him to those not looking for a sociological perspective on the crime problem. Time notes that intellectuals and ultra-liberals already in Lindsay's camp accepted Kerner's conclusion that white society's long history of racism was to blame for the riots and that sacrifices would be necessary to repair America's deteriorating inner cities, but most white New Yorkers did not. Marchi called the report "useful" but stressed that he felt no guilt, "my parents were eating spaghetti in Italy, remember." As for Procaccino, Time cites him recounting the anti-Italian discrimination that kept him out of the big law firms, and in response to a question about whether or not he agreed with

3 Combining the Post and Time articles, we find that the Lindsay world encompasses the East Side of Manhattan, Central Park poetry readings, Wall Street boardrooms, discotheques, penthouse parties, private school accents, and (Ivy League) limousine liberals. 47

the commission's racism thesis, he replied: "Absolutely not, although I realize that there have been instances of discrimination. We have to have someone in office who can understand what it is like to be discriminated against." The article notes that such an attitude overlooks the fact that blacks face obstacles other groups did not. Still, Time asserts throughout that neither Marchi nor Procaccino are racists, and it quotes the latter clearly asserting that the term "law and order" means just that. Lindsay ultimately won the election. Scammon and Wattenberg contend that he did so largely because his opponents split the anti-Lindsay vote, and because Procaccino came to be perceived more as a political clown than a viable candidate. They cite as a classic example the instance in which he told a black audience "My heart is as black as yours" (243). Still, he crafted a message that appealed to "The Troubled White American," the group Newsweek put at the center of a special report in the first week of October 1969. Newsweek emphasized the white American's majority status more than New York or the Washington Post. The report took a nationwide perspective rather than focusing on New York City, and it expanded the scope beyond blue-collar workers into the white collar middle class. The magazine stressed many of the same themes of discontent and resentment as other reports of the era, and the field reporters seem to have been interested in people who used the word nigger very freely, but it ultimately downplays the possibility of revolt while conspicuously nudging the seething narratives toward happy endings. Opening with a pendulum analogy, Newsweek describes how America (meaning the media) has gone from being obsessed with alienated minorities – black militants, welfare mothers, hedonistic hippies, and campus revolutionaries – to focusing on "America's vast middle-class majority." This is the group that "outnumbers, outvotes and could, if [it] chose to, outgun the fringe rebel." The report notes that this average white citizen has been dubbed "the Middle American," and is part of the group that President Nixon calls "the forgotten Americans." Thus the report codes the term Middle American as white (and, despite some interviews with women, male), which Scammon and Wattenberg, a year later in The Real Majority, would try to undo by insisting that blacks constitute an important part of Middle America. According to Newsweek, this vaguely conceived white middle income group, which it does not bother to define via tangibles such as income statistics, is made up of both blue- and white-collar families and comprises three-fifths of the nation's (1969) white population. Newsweek contends that Nixon's election was an expression of this majority's disquiet. In reference to them, the magazine quotes the president as declaring "These are my people. We speak the same language." The report depicts Nixon's people as "nervously edging rightward in a desperate try to catch its balance after years of upheaval." The description of this rightward trending is notable for its lack of economic issues; there are no calls to dismantle Medicare or privatize Social Security, only the reassertion of traditional values in the form of American flag decals in car windows, crusades to get prayer back in public schools and sex education out, attempts to curtail pornography, and a nationwide surge in law-and-order politicians. The trend toward conservatism seems to be, specifically, a trend toward social conservatism in response to the rise of the Social Issue. Newsweek contends that for blacks the "social momentum" of the Kennedy-Johnson era has come to an end. "With Nixon setting the tone," the article sees the country pulling back from active interest in the black minority, going so far to compare the new era to the end of Reconstruction. The "tone" also includes an unleashed willingness – especially among blue

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collar workers – to express hostile prejudices. A worker in a Slavic neighborhood states that

Everybody wants a gun. They think they've heard from black power, wait till they hear from white power—the little slob, GI Joe, the guy who breaks his ass and makes this country go. Boy, he's getting sick and tired of all this mess. One day he'll get fed up and when he does, look out!

Counterdemonstrations by workers in and Chicago against blacks picketing construction sites to demand jobs indicate more deep-rooted antagonisms. As I indicated above, though, Newsweek does not see signs of outright rebellion. This seems due in large part to the distinction "the average white American" makes between his or her own prospects for the future and America's. In short, the typical middle class American is reported to be optimistic about his or her individual future but pessimistic about America's. This pessimism stems from a declining standard of morality (including sexual content in the ), violent tactics by campus radicals and militant blacks, and the belief that police do not have enough power to fight crime and disorder. The report describes how these issues, combined with resentment over social programs that are perceived to be geared toward blacks, combine to create the white majority's sense of victimhood. As Newsweek puts it: "Out of perversity or ignorance, he is convinced that Negroes actually have a better chance to get ahead in America than he does and that any troubles blacks suffer are probably their own fault." People interviewed rail against recent Supreme Court decisions concerning the rights of criminals, money spent on the space program, and organizations and programs designed to help minorities, especially blacks. As one California construction worker puts it: "The niggers are all organized. So are the Mexicans, even the Indians. Who the hell speaks for me?" The head of the National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups argues "we spend millions and the Negroes get everything and we get nothing." Such statements indicate how white ethnics insisted on comparing race and ethnicity, and how the language of identity politics was being adopted even by whites such as the construction worker who did not explicitly identify himself as ethnic. The study finds that families with less economic security feel more threatened by inflation and black militancy. Protective of their union heritage and what they perceive as threats to their property values, white workers are depicted as resistant to integration drives because they threaten their standing in the world. Newsweek also talks about the "unholy alliance" that lower- middle-class whites "feel" – again, rather than, based on the demographics of Lindsay's support, recognize – "has grown up between the liberal Establishment and Negro militants to reshape American life at their expense." The article lists school busing and Kerner's "white racism" conclusion as two products of this alliance, and workers ridicule as hypocrites wealthy liberal policy-makers who send their own children to private schools. S.I. Hayakawa, the president of State College who became a mainstream hero by suppressing demonstrations on his campus, argues that the educated elite is perilously out of touch with the middle-class, citing the propensity of well-off suburbanites to demand the integration of downtown schools and draft-exempt students protesting a war that "working people's children" are fighting. Hayakawa adds, and in the process puts his finger on the patriotism component of the Social Issues, that these workers are praying for victory and "want to believe America is right."

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The report also suggests the rise in (white) Middle America of a nascent form of their own brand of identity politics. One Congressman describes such a rise of "ethnic " as a reaction against black militancy: "The rise of Negro militancy has brought a revival of ethnic orientation in other groups." Others, such as blue-collar writer Eric Hoffer, make what seem to be allusions to the Kerner Report and its WASP-ish vice chairman, John Lindsay: "We are told we have to feel guilty. We've been poor all our lives and now we're being preached to by every son of a bitch who comes along. The ethnics are discovering that you can't trust those Mayflower boys." According to Newsweek, this new nationalism, combined with increased competition with blacks for jobs, results in more vociferous anti-black sentiments and a pervading suspicion of liberalism. Newsweek recounts how the mistrust of "Establishment Liberals" has led to scrambling by Democratic organizations to keep working-class ethnics in the (New Deal) coalition. One lobbyist for the ethnic lobby insists in the article that "the ethnic vote is up for grabs." He states that while his constituents are as leery of Republicans as they are of liberal Democrats, "if the Republicans grab the opportunity they can forge an alliance with ethnics and remain in power for a long time." Perhaps inevitably, the article references The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips, who envisions a new GOP majority based on the South, heartland, and whites fed up with Democratic "social engineering." And in a statement that reflects Phillips' assertion about "the great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish mass," a sociologist notes how reassuring Nixon is to middle-class Americans, and how he is perfectly designed for the times: "His kind of corny, square, ketchup-on-cottage-cheese image is very reassuring to these people." The article does not quote anybody who contends that Nixon's bitterness and serial collection of resentments made him perfect for the time, which, considering what follows in the report, would have been appropriate. The next section, entitled "How It Feels To Be Caught In the Middle," attempts to quantify the white majority's resentment. The magazine stresses that Middle America is not monolithic, and "its over-all statistical unity conceals many shadings of opinions." Education accounts for most of these differences; people who attended college tend to have better, higher- paying jobs and be more racially tolerant and less bothered by young protesters. By contrast, those with grade school educations tend toward blue-collar work, financial insecurity, and anger over social upheaval. Age, sex, and region account for other variations of opinions. Despite these shadings, "Middle America is united in its discontent—and, increasingly, sees itself as an oppressed majority." A construction foreman, for example, asserts that "welfare people" and the rich both get out of taxes while the middle-class family is simply forgotten. Newsweek cites resentment toward blacks as simultaneously the most obvious and complex feature of Middle America's new mood. The report contends that these feelings of resentment do not reflect overt racism since blacks are not being targeted simply for their race. In fact, polled whites agreed 2 to 1 that blacks faced discrimination and deserved better treatment. However, resentment stems from the fact (Newsweek asserts it as fact) that black progress in the realms of employment, education, and housing come partly at a cost to the middle class, which Newsweek blatantly codes white. Black demands for, and white-liberal rhetoric in favor of, reparations are said to be exacerbating resentment. Added to that is the belief by "a substantial minority of " that blacks already have advantages over whites: 4 in 10 asserted that blacks have a better chance than whites of getting a good job for themselves and a good education for their kids. Two-thirds claimed blacks get preferential treatment in benefits, and many Middle Americans professed a belief that police and the courts treat blacks

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leniently. 73 percent of respondents agreed with the assertion that blacks "could have done something" about ghetto conditions, and 55 percent thought blacks to blame for the unemployment rate in their community. Nearly four out of five thought that welfare recipients, who Newsweek stresses tend to be stereotyped as predominately black, "could earn their own way if they tried." With what was likely a reference to the Kerner conclusion, Newsweek contends "it is hardly surprising that Middle America" displays scant enthusiasm for "sacrifices" to facilitate black progress. The rest of the article touches on the familiar topics, including crime, values, and pocketbook issues. Contrary to previous articles that discussed crime and race, Newsweek asserts that Middle American prejudice is most pronounced when the topic of crime is raised, and "large numbers" automatically associate crime with blacks. The article quotes a North Carolina woman who expresses her community's fear: "We are really afraid with the colored right in our backyard." An investment adviser in Pennsylvania defined "law and order" as "get the niggers. Nothing else." The survey found that 63 percent assert that police lack the power to properly deal with suspected criminals, while two-thirds think that judges should have the authority to deny bail to suspects deemed likely to commit another crime. On the topic of values, 7 out of 10 thought people to be less religious than they were half a decade ago, and 86 percent asserted sexual permissiveness was weakening the nation's moral foundation. Economically, a quarter of the middle-class Americans polled said inflation had caused them to cut back on spending, while 44 percent said that with inflation they were barely breaking even. Newsweek found a happy ending, though. "A clear plurality of 48 percent" concurred with the assertion that experimentation was necessary to find new ways of coping with the nation's problems. The final paragraph of "How It Feels To Be Caught In the Middle" is speckled with quotations from workers who assert that change is not bad, Americans are great improvisers, and we won't let the country go down the drain. The next piece in the report, "The Square American Speaks Out," has the same studied distance that the Time article had. The author, Karl Fleming, "crisscrossed the country to sample the feelings of Richard Nixon's 'forgotten Americans'—especially working-class whites." This sojourn among the philistines set-up, combined with the explicit reference to squareness in the title, alerts the reader that they are in for some version of the Lawrence Welk and cottage cheese references, which comes in the second and third paragraphs with the reporter's sartorial descriptions: "He wears white starched shirts, with baggy pants, work shirts with his name in red on the breast, white ankle-high cotton " while "She wears wire-stiff bouffants, girdles, at the knee print ." They also go on Sunday drives and have backyard barbecues and watch television. Fleming finds them "almost pathetically eager to talk, as if nobody had ever asked before." He describes their mood to be one of fretful disquiet and hostile toward the poor for being on the dole and the rich for shirking taxes. Fleming's interviewees discuss well-off campus radicals, school prayer, and the impact of the judiciary on crime. A maintenance man from Texas gets angry when he sees rich kids tearing up colleges and throwing away their opportunities to get an education. "I had to work. I would have liked to go to college so I could have a job where I could sit up there all day and be clean." A middle-aged woman near Los Angeles complains that people like her count for nothing these days: "One woman can stop prayer in the schools. And a man with a prison record is patted on the head and told to go do it again. Because Mr. Warren handcuffed our police, our laws are not protecting anyone." She also advocates for hippies baths,

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haircuts, and "a good old-fashioned strap" to straighten them out, and asserts that "their mothers are too busy at cocktail parties and bridge clubs to be mothers." Of course race comes up frequently, and the issue swirls around ethnic comparisons and crime and disorder. The son of a Greek immigrant who runs a diner in Springfield, Massachusetts asserts that the problems blacks face fail to compare to what his father went through in 1910: "[…] he could speak five or six languages. People laughed at him and called him stupid." As opposed to ten years ago, he lets petty theft go because "you never know if they're hopped up on dope or something." In reference to the riots, he believes that "you or I" would be incarcerated for stealing a pastry, "but they walk out with TV sets and the police are afraid to do anything about it." A salesman in a department store down the street argues that "looters should be shot, […] but in this store, if you see a colored person take something, you don't say anything. The store might be hit. It isn't worth a $25 ." This theme continues in San Leandro, California. A mechanic and two carpenters assert that if they started a riot they would be killed, but "Paint your face black and you can get a new Cadillac and the county will come in and feed your family." One of the men also claims that a black who cries "prejudice" has it made, while if he is stopped by a patrolman he has to pay. They advocate a revolution to "solve this," and one of them has already bought guns. They view dragging the flag across the ground and burning draft cards as treason, and one goes so far as to assert that "we should have a Hitler here to get rid of the troublemakers the way they did with the Jews in Germany." An okra farmer in Texas also advocates violence. Fed up with welfare recipients, college protesters, and draft dodgers, he claims that he and forty or fifty of his South Pacific war buddies could put an end to the riots. "When ol' Mayor Daley give the police in Chicago the right to shoot to kill, it stopped all of that crap, didn't it? I betcha by God if ol' Wallace runs again he'll give them a run for their money." Fleming quotes a steelworker from Middletown, Ohio who is also under the impression that blacks have it easy in 1969 America. "We do all the work. The niggers have got it made." He is tired of blacks working their way into everything, citing recent television trends as an example: "Last three or four months you can't even turn on the damn TV without seeing a nigger. They're even playing cowboys." He claims that transplanted Southerners (of which he is one) comprise 90 percent of Middletown and, hinting at violence, asserts that they are no longer "gonna stand for it." Another industrial worker, a Polish man who works in a Milwaukee heavy machinery factory, urges violence and compares the ethnic and racial experiences. Pointing at a priest and some "militants" who have been picketing the plant for increased minority employment, the worker contends that the picketers would rather protest than work:

If you offered them jobs now, 90 percent of them would run like hell. They ought to take machine guns and shoot the bastards. Period. The Polish race years ago didn't go out and riot and ruin people's property. It took a helluva lot of years for us to get in, and when we did, we had to take the shit jobs.

He also describes being a "peon" and fighting with the bosses for small raises, which he only won through the union, and the grueling monotony of his job: "Day after day, year after year, climbing those same steps, punching that time card. Standing in that same goddam spot grinding those same goddam holes." The heat of the blast furnace and the cost of living leads a steelworker from Hammond, to contend that "guys on relief are a lot happier. They got cars. They got food. I work, and what the hell have I got?"

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This article also features a happy ending, and after pages of resentment and violent imagery, it seems particularly tacked-on. Fleming finds an airline mechanic who is happy with his family and the world. The only thing he wants out of his life is for his kids to grow into decent citizens, and all he needs is to wake up in the morning and receive the joy that hearing the birds gives him. This part of Newsweek's special report seems all the more contrived when one turns the page to find the next article, "In Politics, It's the New Populism." Over the headline is a picture of a shirtless Tony Imperiale, a Newark man with a gigantic belly holding an even more gigantic rifle. He is standing in front of a cabinet looking with pleasure at his rifle, which looks to be about three-fourths as tall as he is. The article talks about law-and-order and beyond, which is to say, vigilantism. Newsweek describes 1969 as the year of the New Populism. The seeds, it contends, had been planted underneath what it calls "liberal hegemony," and it asserts that Middle America increasingly came to believe that liberals did not comprehend or sympathize with whites of the lower-middle-class. As a result, even during the heyday of Kennedy and Johnson, Goldwater seized control of the Republican Party, Reagan won the governorship of California, and Wallace made an impact by railing against bureaucrats. The article again hints at the burgeoning identity politics of the time; most politicians, according to the magazine, agree that this wave of populist sentiment transcends mere racist backlash and that "the little man's" resentment toward blacks stems from "his sense of desertion by a government that appears preoccupied with Negroes' needs and inattentive to his own." The New Populism is thus said to be a quest by an alienated group for recognition rather than a swing to the right. And while there has been a move to the conservative side on law and order, there are few indications of a desire to turn back social programs such as Medicare, education aide, and Social Security. A liberal Congressman notes that working class disgruntlement with liberal politicians is the result of their perceived permissiveness rather than their programs, and a United Auto Worker makes the requisite claim of liberal hypocrisy. On the far right of this movement is the aforementioned Tony Imperiale, Newark mayoral candidate who put together a vigilante gang during the riots of 1967, and who brags of recently going into town with his posse and beating up twenty-two junkies. Newsweek describes him as beyond the mainstream of the New Populism, and groups him with Southerners such as Wallace, who ran insurgent campaigns for president built upon attacks against "pointed-headed intellectuals" and "briefcase-toting bureaucrats" that, the magazine contends, gave him an appeal beyond mere racism. Reflecting on the rise of populists in recent races, Wallace is quoted as contending that "they were making Alabama speeches with a , Los Angeles and New York accent. The only thing they omitted was the drawl." The Los Angeles mayor, Sam Yorty, is presented in contrast to Imperiale and as encapsulating the trend of the Middle American mainstream. In the 1930s he was a New Deal liberal, in the 1940s he was a fervent anti- communist, and by the late 1960s he was sounding the call to law and order. With this image of the evolving Middle American voter in mind, Newsweek's special report concludes with a brief article by Richard Scammon, who details several ominous omens for the Democrats. These portents of political doom include a recent opinion poll "in the bellwether state of California" that found only 24 percent of its citizens labeling themselves "liberal" compared to 27 percent who define themselves as "middle-of-the-road" and 42 percent who brand themselves "conservative." He also asserts that "the new GOP target is very obviously the manual worker," and he contends that a Democratic swing to the far left (or, one must imagine, a perceived swing) in 1972 would end as badly as the Republicans' 1964 swing to the

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right. To such an electoral end, President Nixon sought to capitalize on the Moratorium against the war, a nationwide demonstration in the Autumn of 1969 that led to Nixon's "Silent Majority Speech," which itself ultimately led to the unleashing of Spiro Agnew against the media elites.

The Moratorium, The Silent Majority, and Spiro Agnew Time ran an article in October 1969, "Strike Against the War," that chronicled the build-up to the Moratorium. The concept for the daylong observance is said to have come from a middle- aged envelope manufacturer from Massachusetts. Time, however inadvertently, insisted on alienating Middle America from the event by insisting on emphasizing the role of students in its origin, going so far as claiming "once again it was the 'children's crusade' that led the way" and finding people in the pro-peace business community willing to give credit to kids: "Many parents have been won over by the dialogue with their collegiate children who supported McCarthy." Despite this Crosby, Stills and Nash ambience, the article does depict how widespread and mainstream the peace demonstrations of October 15 were shaping up to be. Time describes a senior citizen center in Maine planning to leave one thousand candles burning on its rooftop, bells tolling in for the American war dead, and housewives in New blocking bridges. The article also offers quotations from a "industrialist and lifelong Republican" fed up with the war and another pillar of commerce who chairs the Business Executives Move for Viet Nam Peace. In essence, the Moratorium was shaping up to illustrate a new kind of war protest, a remarkably middle-class demonstration conducted by people "who have never thought to grow a beard, don a hippie headband or burn a draft card." In fact, organizers sought to shun extremists and avoid ideological in-fighting. As a result, they elicited the ire of radicals, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist who mocked what he saw as "all those McCarthy jackasses […] indulging in their patriotic, onanistic impulses." The SDS were not the only ones eyeing the impending Moratorium with hostility. AFL- CIO delegates voted 999-1 to back President Nixon's Vietnam Policy (while a regional representative of the United Auto Workers reports in the article that contacts with his union members insist that the majority of workers want out of Vietnam, a sentiment different than the one prevalent a mere six months before). A chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom went to court to ensure that their universities stay open on the day of the Moratorium, and Undergraduates for a Stable America took out ads urging students to attend classes that day. Perhaps the most antagonistic to the idea was the Nixon administration. The president insisted at a late September news conference that he would not be affected by it under any circumstances. called it counterproductive and Spiro Agnew called it absurd. In a moment of foresight, Time concludes by asserting that the widespread antiwar sentiment is the political reality Nixon has to face, and "unless he can assert new leadership and rally much of the nation in some unforeseen way, Nixon's timetable for a withdrawal from Viet Nam will surely have to be speeded up." President Nixon's rallying cry would be his Silent Majority speech. Newsweek also took up the impending Moratorium but offered a strikingly different depiction of the event and its organizers. "Nixon and the Moratorium," probably advertently, insisted on alienating Middle America from the event by describing the cohesive "liberal-left coalition" comprising the movement and highlighting famous "Liberal Establishmentarians and doctrinaire leftists" planning to administer "what amounts to history's biggest teach-in against the war." Newsweek quotes a volunteer from San Francisco (as opposed to a businessman from Denver) who insists he and others against the war are the majority, "and we're going to start

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acting like it." The magazine does concede that the peace movement seemed to be enjoying "more community support" than ever before. "Nixon and the Moratorium" also monitors the potential impact on the president. A Republican source is cited as asserting that Nixon fails to understand how deep anti-war sentiment runs in the nation, while another member of the GOP who recently spoke with Nixon claimed "he has seen a great many people in the last few weeks. He has been told straight from the shoulder that he is in trouble on the Moratorium." Despite the disagreement on the political nature of its organizers, both major weeklies concurred that the buildup to the Moratorium was turning into a challenge for President Nixon, and nobody knew what move he would make when it was his turn. The day after the Moratorium, John Herbers reported in the New York Times that a wide spectrum of the population participated in demonstrations ranging from noisy rallies to silent vigils. He also notes that "the demonstrations drew largely on" students and other youths plus the middle class and professional groups. Counting demonstrators, children who skipped school and workers who took the day off, those who attended school and work but wore armbands, plus everyone who prayed at home and in churches, the total amount of individuals who observed the Moratorium possibly reached into the millions. Herbers states that the largest and most exuberant demonstrations took place on the West Coast and in the Northeast, while those in the South and Midwest tended toward the subdued. The day also highlighted the rift in the nation over the war. According to the Herbers, counter protests broke out in some areas, and supporters of the war who had been quiet angrily asserted their positions. Although unions such as the United Auto Workers supported the Moratorium, blue-collar workers comprised the active opposition in many areas. Opposition was expressed across the country in many ways. Motorists drove with their headlights on during the daylight hours at the behest of the pro-war Committee for Patriotism, and flags flew at full staff in many communities. Atlanta, Georgia offered a snapshot of the division: Governor ordered the flag to be flown at full staff over the state to support President Nixon, while a block away, Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. ordered the flag over City Hall lowered to half staff to honor those who died in the war. Representing the heartland, Times reporter Nan Robertson describes the day of Mary Fleege, an Irish-Catholic mother of five who joined a vigil in Duluth, . Perhaps to emphasize her normalcy, Robertson describes how Mrs. Fleege left after the vigil's conclusion to "tend to her children, put another load of washing through the machine and bake the supper casserole." The daughter of a railroad worker and an alum of Midwestern parochial schools, Robertson describes Fleege as apart from the campus and intellectual environment that has been the base of demonstrations against the war, and her priest describes her as "anything but an activist." Still, Mrs. Fleege comes across as ahead of the curve of social change: she is reported to have challenged the doctrine of celibacy for priests and has begun to study nonviolence. Despite these hints of progressivism, the Times uses Mrs. Fleege to illustrate the solidly God and Country middle-class nature of the Moratorium. She looked upon the entire vigil as a prayer, and her priest explained her need to take this stand as "basically a religious development." She whispered "Hail Marys," softly sang "America the Beautiful," and marveled that she had never done anything so daring in her life. Perhaps because he was alarmed that such nonshouters were taking to demonstrating in their own quiet way, President Nixon made a televised speech on November 3, 1969 to ask for support for his Vietnam policy. According to transcripts, Nixon described the situation he inherited, explained how he refused to take the easy way out by ordering an immediate

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withdrawal and blaming the defeat on his predecessor, offered a brief historical overview of American involvement in the region, and talked about peace initiatives his administration had taken. Nixon then explained the implementation of the plan, which was designed to enable the South Vietnamese to take responsibility for the security of their country so that the gradual withdrawal of American troops could continue. Turning his attention toward dissenters, Nixon told his audience that he recognized that some disagreed with his plan for bringing peace, and he noted that "honest and patriotic Americans have reached different conclusions as to how peace should be achieved." He did not cite the patriotic and religious mother of five from Duluth as an example, though. Instead, the president recounted being in San Francisco – as opposed to Duluth or Houston – and seeing demonstrators carrying signs that read "Lose in Vietnam. Bring the boys home." After paying the requisite lip service to the strength of America as a free society and our right to free expression, President Nixon asserted that "I would be untrue to my oath of office to be dictated by the minority who hold that point of view and who try to impose it on the nation by mounting demonstrations in the street." Nixon then turned the notion of our free society around and built on the image of this obnoxious, San Francisco-ish (read elite) minority in order to set up the phrase by which this speech would become known: "If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society." Nixon clearly grasped that active opposition to the war had crept off of campuses and into the realm of Middle America. Thus, as the phrase "vocal minority" suggests, he had to recast dissent against his war policy as the purview of a minority elite and shore up his support by utilizing the most effective populist tropes at his disposal. Playing up to his square constituency, Nixon told the Lawrence Welkish mass in TV-Land that "I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism and national destiny these days, but I feel it is appropriate to do so on this occasion" before imploring them not to let future historians record that when America was the world's most powerful nation, they "allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of ." And on that note he pivoted: "So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support." First it was the Forgotten Americans, then the Silent Center, and finally the Silent Majority against the Elites, the Liberal Establishment, and the Vocal Minority. According to Nixon, his pledge to end the war and win the peace depended on support from the American people. In a line almost as famous as the phrase "Silent Majority," Nixon asked his followers to unite for peace and against defeat, "Because let us understand: cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that." Nixon had, in essence, shifted attention to the enemy within and recast even the most peaceful of demonstrators as out to humiliate America. Nixon's speech was unequivocally successful. According to biographer Conrad Black, the president's Silent Majority rallied behind their leader and sent eighty thousand letters and telegrams (almost all positive) to the White House, an instant telephone poll indicated 77 percent support for President Nixon, and the Gallup Poll saw his approval rating jump from 52 to 68 percent (638). In his memoirs, the former president's pride in the speech leaps off of the page. He describes working through the night to compose it and calling his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, in the morning to tell him "The baby's just been born!" (409). Nixon also notes that after his address the show of popular support moved Congress to back his policies: 300 members of the House (181 Republicans and 119 Democrats) cosponsored a resolution supporting his handling

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of the war, while 58 Senators (37 Republicans and 21 Democrats) signed letters expressing their approval (410). With all of this wind at his back, Nixon and his staff decided to take on the television network news organizations "for their biased and distorted 'instant analysis' and coverage" (411). Black describes how Nixon, soon after the Moratorium, set up in the White House a secret Middle America Committee as part of "a massive pitch to the great, solid, middle of America to reduce the influence on them of the national networks and newspapers." Black adds that Nixon hoped to exploit the public's distrust of the media, which he found to be a "narcissistic, irresponsible elite" (630-31). Black also notes that Vice President Agnew had actually fired the opening shots of the campaign in New Orleans just four days after the Moratorium. Nixon describes the administration's challenge to the press and its practice of analyzing a speech immediately after its delivery as a move to save democracy: "Unless the practice were challenged, it would make it impossible for a President to appeal directly to the people, something I considered to be of the essence of democracy" (Nixon 411). To Nixon, such analysis functions as an interpretive filter; his words run through this sieve of elite opinion, which works to determine how the public will give meaning to such speeches. Nixon states that a few days after the address sent a memorandum that appealed for a "direct attack" on network commentators. Buchanan submitted a draft a few days after that, which Nixon "toned down" and assigned to the vice president, who then "moderated" some of that draft's more strident language and tailored it to his own style. He delivered this address on November 13, 1969 in Des Moines, Iowa (411). With Agnew in mind, writer Godfrey Hodgson offers a fascinating perspective on the media's relationship with Middle America during this time period. He argues that during the summer of 1968, in the aftermath of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, reporters became consumed by the fear that "haunts all elites," that is, "the fear of being out of touch with the majority, the fear of being unpopular" (382). Hodgson contends media figures realized the extent to which the public overwhelmingly favored the actions taken by Mayor Daley and his police force against antiwar demonstrators, and they also recognized the extent to which the public overwhelmingly vilified them for reacting as human beings to the brutality they witnessed. As a result, examples of capitulation abound. Walter Cronkite, who had angrily reported that one of CBS's cameramen had been injured by the police, soon thereafter behaved in an "almost obsequious" manner as he allowed the mayor, during an interview, to "smear the organizers of the demonstrations as Communists and to pass off, unchallenged, the absurd tale that the police's behavior was justified because he, the mayor, had secret intelligence of an assassination plot." Cronkite also consistently addressed Daley as "sir" and noted that he and the mayor had "always been friends" (372-73). Weeks after the convention, the Washington Post put the beatings in perspective by stating commonsensically that the police were annoyed by the sight of men with beards, while the editor of the Chicago Daily News took issue with one of his reporters who had shouted "For God's sake, stop that!" to police officers who were beating three young girls, and who had himself spent two days in the hospital after they responded to his plea by beating him. His editor explained regretfully that his reporter "acted as a human being, but less than professionally" (373-74). Professionalism was the order of the day at Nixon's inauguration, and it continued throughout the year. According to Hodgson, NBC strictly forbade any coverage whatsoever of the "counter-inauguration" and any other protests against the war and the new president. CBS did briefly show some demonstration footage, but apologized to viewers for doing so (376). Hence a

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key point of Hodgson's chapter, which is that Agnew began a prolonged attack against news organizations that had long since been cowed into submission. Hodgson contends that the vice president's assault on the media, particularly the television networks, in Des Moines, Iowa on November 13 was designed to further intimidate them from covering the follow-up Moratorium scheduled for November 15. As a result, "In Washington alone, more than half a million people took part in the largest and most impressive demonstration of all. And there was no live coverage at all by any of the three networks." Thus, Hodgson concludes, "the networks almost convinced the American people that the peace movement was dead, at the moment of its greatest popularity" (377). Of course transcriptions of Agnew's major speeches, which appear in the appendix of John R. Coyne, Jr.'s hagiographic description of the vice president's populist war against the Liberal Elite, The Impudent Snobs: Agnew vs. the Intellectual Establishment, offer no indication that the media were doing anything but fawning over protesters. Four days before the October Moratorium, Agnew addressed a fundraising dinner in Montpelier, Vermont, where he attacked demonstrators and their media enablers. By asking his listeners to consider the absurdity prevalent in American society, Agnew established the overarching metaphor of his speech. Demonstrators comprised a theater of the absurd, and media figures functioned as fawning critics who lavished attention on them and encouraged their outlandish spectacles. The "average American," by contrast, "the man who believes in God and country, hard work and honest opportunity, is denounced for his archaic views." Agnew, tired of the blame America first crowd, underscores the absurdity of a nation that "has provided more justice, equality, freedom, and opportunity than any nation in world history" being "told to feel guilty for its failures." The vice president thus employed a version of conservative populism to ridicule those working for change as emotionally masochistic; he was a firebrand for the patriotically self-satisfied, an agitator for the status quo, and a voice of reason during a time when liberals such as those on the Kerner Commission had the audacity to ask for sacrifices. Knowing now that the administration was worrying over how to handle the Moratorium, the vice president's speech reads as if he sought to shame the media into not covering it. Agnew claimed that the public official who tends to his constituents' business has little chance of , while "the headlines are won by those who attack our nation as an imperialist aggressor or attempt to justify violence as an outlet for the aggrieved." With this in mind, Agnew described "the authors of the absurd" as "a strident few in our society who have conferred upon themselves a position of moral superiority." And because such malcontents could not argue their position "on logic" – much of Agnew's rhetoric was built on a thinking versus feeling dichotomy – nor within the democratic system, "the authors of the absurd have set their scene outside the system. Their drama cannot be played by the rules of representative government." Agnew listed the "disruption" of the 1968 Democratic Convention as one of their works that "won the praise of some liberal critics." Another was the closing down of by the SDS, which "won such rave reviews that SDS repertory groups began opening revivals across the nation." Later in the month, in Louisiana four days after the October Moratorium, Agnew lobbed some of his most famous rhetorical grenades (248-53). He started with thoughts that actually echoed what Norman Mailer said about the remaking of the human nervous system: "Sometimes it appears that we are reaching a period when our senses and our minds will no longer respond to moderate stimulation." He claimed that young people – not all the young, but those who claim to speak for them – "overwhelm themselves with drugs and artificial stimulants." This leads to a loss of subtlety, and ultimately "fine distinctions based on acute reasoning are carelessly ignored

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in a headlong jump to a predetermined conclusion." The result is the abandonment of the intellectual life for the visceral, "and the most visceral practitioners of life are those who characterize themselves as intellectuals." Truth for these people comes as a revelation rather than proved through logic, and Agnew asserts that students now go to college not to learn but "to proclaim." And, recalling the discussion of guilt found in the Vermont speech, Agnew famously asserted that "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." All of that was the setup for Agnew's true objective: to smear Moratorium participants as overemotional and impractical children flirting with treason. He argued that discussion about the war had been distorted by oversimplication (as opposed to fine distinctions based on acute reasoning), and the Moratorium reflected the confusion rampant in the nation. He sweepingly described the demonstrators as "well-motivated young people, conditioned since childhood to respond to great emotional appeals" who failed to stop and consider that leaders of the event promoted it as an outpouring of opinion against the President of the United States' foreign policy, and he added that its leaders "refused to disassociate themselves from the objective enunciated by the enemy in ." Returning to reason versus emotion, he declared that if the Moratorium had any use, it was to serve as an "emotional purgative" for those needing to cleanse themselves of their inability to put forth constructive solutions to the Vietnam problem. With that, Agnew offered point by point comparisons of the Vietnam situation President Nixon inherited versus the situation ten months later, and he emphasized the Vietnamization program, de-escalation, and the drop in American casualties. Agnew depicted all of these actions as part of "a constructive program," and he asserted that the Moratorium marchers offered only "an emotional bath for the people of the United States and this country can't afford to be torn to pieces by that kind of demonstrating in the streets." By the end of October, Agnew was on a roll. In Harrisburg (257-61), he reiterated many of the points he had made earlier in the month and added an explicit call for political realignment based on values. In other words, the vice president was working to build a new Republican majority based on social values rather than economic interests. Agnew was also laying the groundwork for Nixon's "Silent Majority" speech. He declared that the time had come for "the preponderant majority, the responsible citizens of this country, to assert their rights. It is time to stop dignifying the immature actions of an arrogant, reckless, inexperienced element within our society." Agnew's goal was to draw on the language of populism to rally the nation's oppressed majority against "those who encouraged government by street carnival." Of course the vice president made it a point to explain that he believed in dissent, free speech, peaceful assembly, and the right of . With that out of the way, Agnew asserted that the thousands who participated in the Moratorium to express their desire for peace "were used – yes, used – by the political hustlers who ran the event." Perhaps Agnew failed to consider that his overarching metaphor, a political carnival run by hustlers, put thousands (some would say millions) in the role of gullible marks and might therefore be construed as condescending, especially by thoughtful dissenters who arrived at their opinions on the war rationally. But such demonstrators were not really Agnew's target audience. He shared his administration's goal of soothing his constituency's collective conscience, in this case about America's actions in Vietnam, and he sought to shore up his party's new majority by vilifying those who questioned the precept that America was always on the side of the angels. Agnew, in short, employed patriotically-tinged conservative populism to thwart calls for changes in Nixon's war policy.

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Now fully in populist mode, Agnew turned his attention to the select few who professed their moral superiority to the majority of Americans. He asserted that the self-righteous, not the greedy nor even the malicious, were the ones responsible for the worst atrocities in history, and he mocked the "self-proclaimed saviors of the American soul" who "would have us believe that they alone know what is good for America; what is true and right and beautiful." Returning to the theme of revelation versus reason that he sounded earlier in the month, Agnew claimed that these saviors would have the majority of Americans believe "that their revealed righteousness is more effective than our reason and experience," and he emphasized that they were merely a vocal minority wielding undue influence. With that in mind, he asked his audience to think about how "small of students" were able to shut down universities, "small groups of protestors" managed to shout down candidates for office, and "small cadres of professional protestors" could undermine the president's efforts to win the peace. Agnew then delved into his call for political realignment. To this end, he introduced his idea of "positive polarization," a "constructive realignment" that would finally occur after the nation rejected "superficial" demographic categories such as young versus old, white versus black, and rich versus poor and divided instead along "authentic lines," that is, along "principles and values shared by citizens regardless of age, race, creed, or income." Such values, Agnew stressed, are rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic, and its laws have evolved from the principle of government by consent of the governed. With this, Agnew the populist returned to the "impudent snob" remark of his New Orleans speech and explained that he categorized "the glib, activist element who would tell us our values are lies" as impudent "because anyone who impugns a legacy of liberty and dignity that reaches back to Moses is impudent." As for the "snobs" part of the phrase, Agnew explained that "I call them snobs for most of them disdain to mingle with the masses who work for a living. They mock the common man's pride in his work, his family and his country." The "impudent snobs," then, were the elitists opposed to the common man, the non- producers who live off the workers. They were unpatriotic, they mocked and patriotism, and they comprised a strident minority who hog the media spotlight. With that Agnew returned to the Moratorium and called for the end of the carnival of demonstrations against the war. He asserted that many of the event's participants were not aware that its organizers sought immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, and he accordingly urged citizens who wanted peace "to read and reflect on the problem," to consider the consequences of such an abrupt disengagement, and to realize "the danger of constant carnival." He also called on "the mature and sensitive people of this country" to understand how "avowed anarchists and communists" were exploiting their freedom to protest. Agnew, in an obvious attempt to sway mainstream Americans who partook in such subdued vigils as the one in Duluth to stay home from the next one, contended that such hustlers "prey upon the good intentions of gullible men everywhere" and "pervert honest concern to something sick and rancid." Then, in a particularly dark turn, Agnew claimed that the perpetual shock of demonstrations would lead to society settling for the order of a totalitarian state. Just as he seemed oblivious to the irony of following up his accusations of condescension with urging people to read and think and calling them gullible, the vice president followed up his accusations that leaders of the Moratorium were anarchists and communists by urging the cessation of demonstrations "before the witch-hunting and repression" began. After President Nixon gave his address to the nation on November 3 and had his words subjected to instant analyses by network pundits, Agnew appeared in Des Moines ten days later to rally the Silent Majority against the media contingent of the elite liberal establishment. The

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transcript (265-70) shows that the vice president immediately introduced the primary themes of the speech: the importance of television news to the American people, its influence over public opinion, and the lack of real checks on its vast power. The transcript also shows the extent to which Agnew framed his attack on the network news in the oldest of populist terms, the common majority versus the Eastern Elites, the latter of whom, in the era of Middle American conservative populism, comprised an intellectual/cultural values – rather than monetary – aristocracy. Agnew relied on his usual rational versus emotional dichotomy in Des Moines. He asserted that President Nixon spent weeks preparing his speech (as opposed to it being revealed to him via psychotropic drugs), and on the night of the address he "reasoned" with the nation for thirty-two minutes. The president's painstakingly written and reasoned appeal, however, was "subjected to instant analysis and querulous criticism" by pundits. In essence, the seventy million Americans who gathered to hear the president were "inherited by a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the majority of whom expressed, in one way or another, their hostility to what he had to say." In other words, the audience tuned in to hear the president, but were subjected to "self-appointed" experts who, with "their minds were made up in advance," received the viewers as their own and filtered Nixon's message. Agnew stressed that Americans have "the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a presidential address without having the President's words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested." With his multiple use of forms of the word hostile, plus prejudice, Agnew implies that the commentators attacked the president irrationally. Agnew's attack on the punditry underscores a familiar administration theme: the danger of a small, vocal minority who insist they know what is best for the nation. Agnew declared to his audience that his goal was to turn their attention to "this little group of men" who "enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address" and "wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation." According to Agnew, forty million Americans watched the nightly network news and, according to polls and studies, the networks served as the sole source of national and world news for millions of them. The news of the day was determined by a dozen or so anchormen, commentators, and producers who sifted through 90 to 180 minutes of available footage to select twenty minutes to be broadcast. Agnew emphasized their broad powers of choice, and their ability to "create national issues overnight. They can make or break – by their coverage and commentary – a Moratorium on the war." After strongly implying that the networks had undermined the war effort and blown the first Moratorium out of proportion, Agnew pivoted toward his attack on Eastern elitism. According to the vice president, such elites often wield their power subtly, undermining the credibility of a public official or the prudence of a policy with raised eyebrows, changes in inflection, and caustic remarks. He contended that despite their hold on concentrated power, all we know of commentators is "that they reflect an urbane and assured presence, seemingly well informed on every important matter." This appearance of sophistication perhaps comes from the fact, as Agnew asserted, that "these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, DC or New York City." Agnew cited 's quotation about New York being the United States' "most unrepresentative community" before himself claiming that "both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism." Worse, according to the vice president, commentators and producers

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form their views from the same sources and talk constantly to one another, which artificially reinforces their shared points of view. Agnew insisted that "The views of this fraternity do not represent the views of America," and he cites as evidence the gulf between the positive national reception given to the president's speech and how the commentators reviewed it. He contended that Americans do not tolerate governmental concentrations of power and should therefore "question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government." Agnew's use of terms such as fraternity and privileged was clearly designed to convey exclusivity and elitism, and his caveat that these men were unelected implies that they have come to prominence by appointment rather than having sought and earned public support. The vice president maintained that he was not advocating , but asking if a form of censorship was already being executed. In addition to failing to reflect the views of the nation, Agnew asserted that in its quests for profits the media endlessly pursued controversy and created a distorted image of America. He added, in a phrase that implicitly damned the media for having ignored Middle America, that "normality has become the nemesis of the network news." He contended that small pieces of the whole had become, in the minds of millions of viewers, the entire picture. Those who rely only on the network news for their information might conclude, for example, that most students are radicals, that most black Americans feel nothing for their country, and that disorder is the rule rather than the exception on college campuses. He rhetorically asked whether a preponderance of air time had been granted to "the minority of Americans who specialize in attacking the United States, its institutions, and its citizens," rather than, he insinuates, the Silent Majority. In his conclusion, Agnew urged "the people" to "defend themselves" by informing the networks that they want the news "straight and objective" and suggested they "register their complaints on bias through mail to the networks and phone calls to local stations." Such a campaign, as Hodgson demonstrates above, ensured the November Moratorium would be largely ignored in the electronic media. Buchanan's involvement with the Des Moines speech is made all the more apparent by his book The New Majority, a quickie victory lap dashed off between Nixon's pulverization of George McGovern and his second inauguration. Buchanan boasts that Nixon's Silent Majority Address "hurled back the challenge" of the Moratorium: "For the President had determined that his constitutional authority was being challenged by an arrogant and unelected elite, emboldened by a few hundred thousand street auxiliaries […]" (11). Nixon's success came not only from the telegrams and approval rating bump; Buchanan stresses, as had Agnew, that reactions to the speech revealed the extent to which the views of the average citizen and those who "dominate the public dialogue" were separated by a vast chasm: "Despite its virtual monopoly on the creation and dissemination of information, the liberal aristocracy was exposed as out of touch with the common man, politically unprepared for the 'trauma of distasteful reversal'" (13). Buchanan's use of terms and phrases such as arrogant, elite, and out of touch illustrate the extent to which the Nixon administration perceived their stand against war protesters and reelection victory to be nothing less than a populist revolution, a (distasteful) reversal that saw the conservative common man cross the chasm and seize power from the liberal aristocracy. Buchanan cites such disparate journalists as David Broder and to bolster his claim that the tide of public opinion turned against elite opinion-makers who had become completely alienated from the masses (13, 16). Despite the rebellion of said masses, Buchanan stresses that the network system still places too much concentrated power in too few hands, and

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he argues that the people have a right to know the "biases and prejudices" that influence the networks' crafting of the news. Those biases and prejudices, of course, are political liberalism, and these journalists represent the essence of privilege: "They are ranking members of the privileged class, the most prestigious, powerful, wealthy, influential journalists in all history" (18-19). The problem, in short, is "that an incumbent elite, with an ideological slant unshared by the nation's majority, has acquired absolute control of the most powerful medium of communication known to man." They discredit those with whom they disagree, advance their own ideological agendas, and hide behind the First Amendment. For a solution, Buchanan refers to , who argued that "the long-range answer lies in more and competing channels of communication, to be achieved partly through the rapid expansion of cable television" (20-22). One can see the seeds of , with their conservative agenda, populist posturing, and claims of being "Fair and Balanced," in these very words. By late summer 1970, campaigning hard for Republican Congressional candidates during the midterm election season, Agnew was reaching the peak of his visibility. The vice president had settled on the term "radical-liberal," sometimes shortened to the even more toxic sounding "radiclib," to describe Democrats the administration thought vulnerable to midterm defeat. Perlstein notes that since most voters still categorized themselves as Democrats, vilifying the party as a whole would be counterproductive. Buchanan and Safire labored over the precise phrasing, and Agnew relished comparing old warhorses such as FDR, Truman, and even JFK to his era's radical liberals. Spouting lines such as "Today's breed of radical-liberal posturing about the Senate is about as closely related to a Harry Truman as a Chihuahua is to a timber wolf" (Perlstein 524), Agnew worked to lure stragglers out of the New Deal coalition by implying that it was the Democratic Party that had changed, that had actually abandoned its level-headed supporters by swinging so far to the left. Agnew's September 14, 1970 speech in Nevada illustrates the nature of the vice president's populist appeals during that campaign season (Coyne 369-74). Save for one fleeting reference to inflation at the very end, Agnew ignored economics and rallied the common man solely around the Social Issue. He described his "Come-Lately Club" (Agnew was fantastically fond of alliterations), which consisted of members of Congress who had "for years winked at disorder" but then, facing an impending election, "suddenly lift high the banner of law and order." With that he sarcastically welcomed to the club , who had recently lashed out at the nation's "campus commandos," which suggests that, regardless of party affiliation, alliterative flair might have been a prerequisite for standing for law and order and against permissiveness. Agnew continued to pit the common man against the liberal media establishment by railing against an editorial that he said compared him to McCarthy, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini and warned that he should watch his rhetoric. He then read a passage from the editorial, "The young intellectual people must never again permit a demagogue to so capture the hearts of the unthinking masses that the very foundations of the nation will be toppled," which he claimed captured "the contemptuousness, the elitism, the condescension toward the good people of this country that are the hallmarks of the radical-liberal." Agnew thereby conflated the press, a notoriously unpopular institution, with the radical-liberal, the term by which the administration was then smearing Democrats, to make the opposition party indistinguishable from radicals and privileged elites who scoffed at the values of good, common Americans. The vice president further argued that the editorial asserted that anyone who openly defended "our principles" is a demagogue, and that the people of the United States need to be led around by "young

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intellectuals." Agnew countered that "we" are not "unthinking masses," and the people of America have the independence, intelligence, judgment, and wisdom to decide for themselves. He also took a swipe at academia and said that these "young intellectuals" should be sent "back to the ivory towers where they belong." Taking these points to the next step, Agnew claimed that "Just because a man works hard, pays his taxes, obeys the laws, does not walk around with a sign demanding surrender now – that does not make him 'unthinking.'" He adds that "Just because a man is a member of the Great Silent Majority of Americans, he does not become what the old Marxists used to call 'the Masses.'" Note how he worked into the equation before adding that this member of the Silent Majority is more of an individual than "those who follow the foolish fads of phony intellectualism." Agnew's solid citizens were said to stand behind their president and were solid citizens of a great republic. More importantly, Agnew was playing an important role in associating liberalism in the mind of the voters with, in addition to radicals and media elites, academics, Marxists, and those advocating surrender. By vilifying liberalism in this way, the conservatives had literally changed the terms of the political debate. The rest of Agnew's speech hit the usual aspects of the Social Issue, especially crime, drugs and the drug culture, and permissiveness in general. The vice president treated his audience to readings of the lyrics of "With a Little Help from My Friends" and "White Rabbit," and he offered a critique of a then-recent movie that has as its heroes two men who lead carefree lives by living off of the sale of drugs. Although he refused to say its title for fear of promoting it (as opposed to the seven songs he name-dropped), his description of the film and his claim that it offered no sympathy for the people with wrecked lives "who bought their drugs and financed our heroes' easy ride" suggests that the film just might have been Easy Rider. By criticizing the entertainment industry in this way, Agnew established the template that conservative politicians hoping to connect with values votes would follow well into the twenty-first century. After listing steps the administration had taken to fight the drug war, Agnew told his listeners that allowing "a creeping permissiveness" to seep into relations with young people only hurt them, indulging disorder in the name of a cause drove society apart, and those who turn a blind eye to the dangerous effects of drugs for fear of being "out of step with the times" fail their children.

If this hard sense brings down upon us the label of being 'squares,' then we will just have to live with it – because it is up to each one of us to squarely face up to the responsibility of being mature human beings.

Agnew not only spun the word square to make it positive, he continued the Nixon tradition of aligning himself with the unhip, the out of step, and the common. And as Nixon established decades before Agnew's rhetorical rampage, the common are just that because there are so many of them, and thus they are indeed a logical place to start if your goal is to build a majority. Agnew's rhetoric and unabashed squareness appears to have made him a hero to Middle America and to parents dealing with kids during an era of increased permissiveness. Life captured the sentiment in a May 1970 cover story entitled "Spiro Agnew Knows Best," which plays on the name of the sitcom "Father Knows Best." The cover features a picture of the vice president with that title plus the clever tag "Stern Voice of the Silent Majority." Author Brock Brower describes how enthusiasm for Agnew and his tirades against protesters, youth agitators, the network news, and liberal newspapers "has swept through Middle America like the croup."

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An unnamed source inside the administration credits Agnew for eschewing tired old issues and clichés and touching people by talking about basic morality and why kids are going bad. Agnew, in other words, was the voice of Middle American, socially conservative populism. According to Brower, speechwriters composed initial drafts of addresses such as the one he gave in Des Moines, but "the good, old-fashioned, parental Talking-To" came from Agnew's own pen. As one might expect, rather than addressing young people in actual need of such a talking-to, Brower describes Agnew's audience in Atlanta as "all lily-white, middle-class, status- torn, money-worried, equally aggrieved parents" who had been teenagers with Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee. Agnew soothes their souls and articulates their feelings of backlash; he brings "succor to other less articulate, more downtrodden father-figures," and he speaks to parents on their level, not at them from on high. To hear a man "who had himself been made just as much a butt, a laughingstock, as they often feel they have" is reassuring, especially to people who insist that elites have excluded their perspectives from the national dialogue. Coyne's The Impudent Snobs specifically lauds Agnew for bringing the Middle American perspective back to national prominence. In a discussion of the Des Moines speech, the author cites an unnamed "student of the Administration" who was not surprised that the rise of the media as a monopoly power led to a confrontation with "America's political estate." The surprise was that the confrontation was provoked "not by a Democratic administration imbued with the anti-Eastern populism of the South and West" or a Left-leaning anti-monopolist administration, "but, rather, by a conventional middle-class Republican administration desiring nothing so much as to keep the country and itself in the center of the road" (48). Coyne presents Agnew's Des Moines speech as an important phase of Middle America's populist uprising against the Eastern Elites. The revolt was culturally conservative rather than economic (not an anti-monopolist crusade), and it was led by a square father-figure who, along with his core constituency, came of age before rock and roll. More importantly, Coyne clearly asserts that the Democrats, or the Left in general, no longer speaks for (his conception of) the people. Coyne rails against the "elitist view" and its exclusion of Middle America and praises Agnew for rectifying the situation. He claims that

Nowhere in the elitist view is there room for the aspirations and frustrations of the middle-class and blue-collar American. The emphasis is always on 'the young, the black, the poor,' and, of course, those affluent liberal types who dwell in the New York- Washington corridor. Thus, as a political phenomenon, Spiro Agnew has emerged as the voice of a long voiceless segment of American society, a segment which has long sufferingly carried most of the nonproductive but highly audible segments on its back. (133-34)

In addition to rearticulating Scammon and Wattenberg's thesis, Coyne codes Middle America as white and posits it as the producers off of whom the core of the liberal coalition – the affluent Eastern Elite, the young, the poor, and the black – live. Coyne's sentiments were part of an attempt by the conservative movement to realign the electorate along the lines of the "producer" versus "non-producer," that is, white and blue collar employees who shared the same social values and did "real" and productive work versus the liberals who produced only words, or nothing at all, and rejected America's core values. In his The Making of the New Majority Party, William Rusher asserts that the partisan political alignment, which had once been drawn along economic lines, has been steadily replaced

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by a coalition of producers at all economic levels who believe in the nation's "original basic values" versus those adhering to the liberal worldview, which he describes as "militantly secular, heavily guilt-ridden, and perhaps even subliminally suicidal" (98). Rusher describes the liberal contingent as composed of "verbalists" in the federal and state bureaucracies, the media, major foundations and research institutes, and the educational establishment running the country to serve the interests of themselves and their welfare constituency. He mocks liberals who advocate redressing, via federal intervention, historical injustices against blacks committed by whites, "as well as other wrongs allegedly committed against a whole series of newly-discovered and acutely self-conscious 'minorities,'" and he lists homosexuals, American Indians, Spanish- speakers, flower people, prison inmates, and women among these "minorities" (98). Rusher argues that the key to a majority party rests with a coalition of economic conservatives and other blocs who identify with conservative critiques of liberalism "thanks to the liberal assault on fundamental social values and the shift in the axis of economic division to one that pits producers against non-producers" (106-07). In other words, he recognizes a coalition of economic and social conservatives, the latter having been driven from the New Deal coalition by the Social Issue. Rusher asserts that social conservatism is a movement of "those who work with their hands: 'hard-' industrial workers, small farmers, and the blue-collar population in general" (108). Unlike Scammon and Wattenberg, Rusher glosses over the blue- collar worker's protectiveness of programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which is not surprising given his role in orchestrating the Goldwater revolt of a decade earlier. As political operatives, Scammon and Wattenberg were preoccupied with workers who earned their living with their hands, and they cite in The Real Majority a statistic indicating that 73 percent of 1970 voters were in families where the earners worked in this manner. They also describe a George Wallace speech in which the Governor complained of a "pseudo-intellectual government" filled with "a select, elite group" who write guidelines from pulpits, colleges, newspaper offices and look "down their noses at the average man on the street," a description that includes glassworkers, steelworkers, autoworkers, textile workers, farmers, policemen, beauticians and barbers, and small businessmen. The elites believe, Wallace told his audience, "that you do not know how to get up in the morning or go to bed at night unless we write you a guideline" (61-62). The authors warn of Wallace's allure among the working class, and Rusher references the same appeal when he lauds the governor as "undoubtedly the leading spokesman of social conservatism" (Rusher 171). In 1975, Rusher considered Wallace a viable candidate to run for the nomination of his new conservative majority party (he was fed up with Republicans at that time), although he cited Wallace's segregationist past, paraplegia, and Alabama accent as potential drawbacks (172, 174-76). Rusher also notes that blue-collar workers in the North tend to be ethnic Catholics. He lists the Irish, Polish, Italian, and Czech (plus other Eastern Europeans) as examples of the ethnic Catholic social conservative who could make up an important strand of a new majority (108). Pat Buchanan also stresses the role of such ethnic Catholics in a new conservative majority. He asserts that "By 1969, the most serious political rupture in the nation was not between Republicans and Democrats, but between the lower and middle class Democratic center and right, and its upper-middle-class elite and left" (62). He lists a variety of issues, "a panoply of concerns and attitudes," where socially conservative Democrats side with Nixon against liberals, including punishing "draft-dodgers" versus calling for amnesty, patriotism versus viewing "flag- waving as a fetish of the simple-minded," being against busing versus wealthy liberals who profess to be for it while sending their kids to "lily-white academies," wanting to close porno

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shops and have "their proprietors horsewhipped" versus warning against "the ugly specter of censorship," and being "outraged and frightened" by crime in the streets versus fretting about the "'root causes' of crime, the 'rights of defendants' and conditions in the prisons" (62-63). With these (social) issues in mind, Buchanan claims that "the Catholic and ethnic and Southern conservative foot soldiers who gave FDR those great landslides" disagree on a profound, fundamental level "with the isolated, intellectual aristocracy and liberal elite who now set the course of their party" (63), which makes "the long-predicted 'realignment of parties' a possibility, and could make Mr. Nixon the Republican FDR" (64). Coyne makes the same points as Rusher about the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the producers versus the non-producers, but he strikes a significantly different tone when discussing the place of George Wallace in the shifting political landscape. Coyne reads Wallace's 1968 success as a wake-up call for politicians to acknowledge working-class anger, especially their anger at "being blamed by the men of words" for the ills of the nation and having the responsibility of white racism placed at their feet by liberal academics (138). He contends that Wallace "knew what drove middle-Americans up the wall," but argues that although the temptations were great, "to their credit, white workingmen didn't quite fall for it" (139). Coyne adds that workers he spoke to could not support Wallace because they feared he was a racist, which they could never be. Thus Agnew's significance: "Agnew's importance is that he gives middle-Americans somewhere to go and provides them with a voice" (139). The author presents Agnew as the middle path between the liberals and Wallace, whose best chance at "the American workingman" arose because the Democrats came to take him for granted and the Republicans assumed they had no real chance to win him over (143). In an ominous tone that recalls Hamill, Coyne warns that unless "those productive citizens of middle-America" are given an outlet to make their views heard, they might just decide "to take care of things themselves." In the context of the discussion, that could mean either supporting Wallace or revolting (146). Of course the irony to this late sixties/early seventies prolonged discussion of how Middle America had been overlooked was the resultant attention lavished on Middle America. Time even named "The Middle Americans" the 1969 Man and Woman of the Year. The article explaining the selection, which appeared in the first week of January 1970, opens with the very familiar discussion of campus radicals, riots, and porn plus such backlash symbols as police chiefs winning mayoral elections, the proliferation of American flag decals, and bumper stickers lauding Vice President Agnew. The article asserts that Middle Americans had been ignored, dismissed by intellectuals, and mocked for their values. They also "inhabit the battle-ground of change," have stood by "while angry minorities dominated the headlines and the Government's domestic action," are tired of the alignment of "the black militancy and the white intellectuals," and view the Moratorium as "a stab in the back to our boys on the firing lines." Time offers a series of neat dichotomies that further construct the Middle American as old-fashioned, square, and patriotic. The editors also provide themselves with plenty of wiggle room to avoid putting forth any real definition of the term. Middle Americans learn baton twirling, not Hermann Hesse; they enjoy the Rockettes, not Oh! Calcutta!; they watch The Green , not Midnight Cowboy. They also send Christmas cards to General Abrams and sing the national anthem at football games (and mean it), but there are no antitheses listed for these last two actions. Time asserts that Middle Americans make up the core of Nixon's "Forgotten Americans" or "Silent Majority," and they tend to be middle-aged and middlebrow in their tastes. The article also makes much of the moon landing as a Middle American achievement, and cites Eric Hoffer, who calls it a "triumph of the squares."

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Not included in Middle America are most blacks, intellectuals, liberals, professors, and surgeons. Time offers no explanations or criteria here, and the article further baffles by explaining that although surgeons tend to be outside its ranks, many general practitioners are solidly Middle American. Perhaps the lack of criteria is explained by this claim: "Above all, Middle America is a state of mind, a morality, a construct of values and prejudices and a complex of fears." Middle Americans are, in short, bound by "a roughly similar way of seeing things," which ensures for outlets such as Time that the construct remains usefully fluid and not bound by such tangible constraints as income statistics. Time stresses Nixon's solidly Middle American credentials and describes how he embodies their approach to politics. Interestingly, this approach includes "a contradictory mixture of liberal and conservative impulses," which recalls the idea that most Americans during this era were "ideologically conservative" and "operationally liberal." The editors claim that Middle America tends to associate crime with blacks and their education tends not to dwell on injustices perpetuated against minorities, but at the same time they mostly agree with the racial progress made in the previous decade. Still, they are predominately against busing, and they see a bias in favor of blacks in college admissions and even in hiring practices throughout the country. Middle Americans are said to associate black militancy and campus dissent, and they were put off by the spectacle of Woodstock. On the economic side, Time notes an acceptance of "socialized medicine" and an agreement with the principle of a guaranteed annual income. A variety of Nixon's policies reflected these stances. Time cites the Philadelphia Plan, his welfare reform proposal that included guaranteed annual wages, draft reform, and SALT talks with the as emanating from the president's liberal side. His conservative side elicited moves such as attempts to steer the Supreme Court toward a principle of strict constructionism, proposing a voting rights bill that would have undermined the gains won under the 1965 version, and delaying the process of school integration. While conservatives such as Coyne and Rusher lauded Spiro Agnew's conservative credentials, Nixon's "liberal" side infuriated them. Coyne writes (in 1972) that "It is very difficult indeed, for instance, to imagine what a liberal Democrat would do that Richard Nixon has not done" (142-43). He cites Nixon's positions on welfare, disarmament, and economics as seemingly "perfectly consistent" with any liberal Democrat's, and he describes Nixon's move to legitimize the Chinese Communist Regime as "mind-boggling" (143). Rusher also lambastes Nixon for recognizing China, deescalating in Vietnam, and backing a family assistance plan. According to Rusher,

There is no sadder chapter in the whole history of American conservatism than that which describes how Richard Nixon, in whom the majority of Republican conservatives at Miami Beach in 1968 had so incautiously placed their faith, systematically and cynically abandoned, between 1969 and 1972, most of the conservative principles that justify participation in politics, including many with which he had been identified for a quarter century. (74)

Rusher cedes that Nixon made conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but beyond that – and this is telling – Nixon's conservative leanings were limited to issues of concern to "the more explicitly social conservative," including opposition to busing, abortion, and pornography (74-77). In other words, Nixon was politically pragmatic: he worked the Social Issue while leaving bread-and-butter programs alone.

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Rusher and Coyne's public anger with Nixon indicate differing views on just how conservative the new conservative majority really was. While both factions within the movement saw the majority of Americans as socially conservative, they clearly disagreed on how "operationally conservative" even Middle Americans were on economic issues. Doctrinaire conservatives sided with Goldwater against Nixon, who clearly recognized Middle America as moderate to liberal on bread-and-butter issues and was ready to cede to their inclinations to attain his majority. This brings us to the Time article's articulation of two key factors that led to Middle America's estrangement from the Democrats in particular and liberalism in general: Nixon's willingness to meet them halfway and the perceived coalition of "the black militancy and the white intellectuals." Shortly after Time's coronation of the Middle American, there occurred in Manhattan an event that would serve as a caricature of the alliance between rich white liberals and militant blacks, "limousine liberalism," and, to add a new phrase to the mix, "radical chic." In "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," first published in New York, Tom Wolfe sardonically chronicles a party (or meeting) that maestro Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw to raise legal defense funds for twenty-one Black Panthers held on charges of conspiring to blow up various facilities throughout New York and . Wolfe employs his acute ear for language and his fascination with the intricacies of cultural history to convey his take on the era's acrimonious intersection of class and race as well as the Eastern aristocracy's disdain for the middle class. Wolfe wryly dubs the period "the season of Radical Chic," and he lists parties that other socialites held for other such causes – including the Chicago Eight, grape workers, the Young Lords, the SDS, GI Coffee Shops, and Friends of the Earth – with an eye toward the complications that arise from such interclass affairs. For example, since having black servants work at such functions would be a faux pas of the highest order, "the current wave of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants." He notes that "some well- meaning soul" might ask why not just avoid having servants if the subject creates such tension and you sincerely believe in equality?

Well, even to raise the question is to reveal the most fundamental ignorance of life in the great co-ops and townhouses of the East Side in the age of Radical Chic. Why, my God! servants are not a mere convenience, they're an absolute psychological necessity.

Wolfe augments this farcical tone with copious splashes of words such as delicious and marvelous before segueing into snapshots of the class division among whites that recall the previous autumn's mayoral race. Wolfe depicts a host or hostess explaining to their white servants with discreet about "what sort of party it is going to be." Such a conversation is a minefield of inter-class/intra-racial awkwardness, for "when talking to one's white servants, one doesn't really know whether to refer to blacks as blacks, Negroes, or colored people. When talking to other… well, cultivated persons, one says blacks, of course" because doing so signifies an awareness of the black race's dignity. Black is also a "touchstone word" that separates the "the cultivated from the uncultivated, the attuned from the unattuned, the hip from the dreary." According to Wolfe, black leaves such a host or hostess susceptible to being sized up by their white servants as a limousine liberal, and it encourages the servants to wonder if you would "do as much for the white lower class." This tension thus leads them to settle on the term Negro when talking to

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white servants to prevent any adversity. The elevator man and the doorman, by contrast, project death rays from their eyes and respond curtly when they realize that it will be one of those parties. But "of course, they're all from Queens, and so forth, and one has to allow for that." Although Wolfe only alludes to the peripheries of electoral politics, one can imagine these angry uniformed men from the outer boroughs welcoming the overtures of conservative populists such as Nixon and Wallace. At the party, the Panther 21's lawyer Leon Quat takes a jab at Agnew – "I assume we are all just an effete clique of snobs and intellectuals in this room…" – before introducing Don Cox, Field Marshal for the . Cox details the Party's ten-point program, explains why they call the police "pigs," and reads the Declaration of Independence in its entirety. Wolfe describes Cox's audience as rapt. Cox is followed by Gerald Lefcourt, the Panther 21's chief counsel, who describes aspects of the case before asking for, and successfully receiving, donations for the Panthers' legal defense fund. Wolfe steps out of the party, so to speak, to historicize the radicalization of liberalism. He asserts that "new arrivals" in Society have always relied on two methods of "certifying their superiority over the hated 'middle class.'" The first is to embrace the trappings of aristocracy, such as magnificent architecture, servants, and protocol; the second is to "indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders," a move designed "to convey the arrogant self-confidence of the aristocrat as opposed to the middle-class striver's obsession with propriety and keeping up appearances." Wolfe's overview focuses mainly on the aristocracy of New York and touches on Jewish and other such "minorities" (quotation marks his) that moved into the ranks of the Establishment, such as Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe describes how "many Jewish members of New Society" have traditionally given support to the cause of civil rights via donations to organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, and CORE, and he notes that since these organizations lacked "social cachet" because of their solidly middle class status, their support must have been sincere. By 1965, however, the anti-war movement and black power "began to gain great backing among culturati in New York," and Wolfe satirically characterizes the impact of the new wave of the black movement: "What a relief it was—socially—in New York—when the leadership seemed to shift from middle class to…funky!" He compares the old guard of A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King, and to Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, LeRoi Jones, and Eldridge Cleaver to trace the increasing militancy of the black movement and to suggest that the white middle class is correct to resent the coalition of the white liberal establishment and black militants since it arose out of a deep-rooted disdain for them. Wolfe emphasizes this derisive attitude toward the middle class, or toward, as Quat's reference to Agnew makes clear, the Middle American state of mind and value system. He writes about the necessity of maintaining "a proper East Side lifestyle in New York Society," which requires a weekend place, preferably for the entire year but at least for the months between mid- May and mid-September, to avoid "those fantastically dowdy herds" of "daddies from Long Island in balloon-seat Bermuda bought at the Times Square Store in Oceanside and fat mommies with white belled pants stretching over their lower bellies and crinkling up in the crotch like some kind of Dacron-polyester labia." Another facet of the lifestyle, in case the description of the first failed to articulate it, is the rule that "the styles of romantic, raw-vital, Low Rent primitives" are good, but those of the middle class, no matter if they are black or white, are bad. Wolfe's essay is thus important to this project because the conservative movement, and the strategists within the Nixon Administration in particular, ingeniously figured

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out how to pin this attitude onto the whole of liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party, which no longer appeared to be the political home for "the people." And as a chronicler of the zeitgeist should, Wolfe concludes with the fallout from the event, which began when New York Times reporter Charlotte Curtis's story about the meeting appeared in the fashion section of the January 15 edition. Objectively reported, Curtis' story contains snippets such as Cox stating "If business won't give us full employment, then we must take the and put them in the hands of the people." To this Bernstein is recorded as replying "I dig absolutely." Besides this Marxism for the Hip and With-It, there was symbolic cannon fodder aplenty for Middle America, such as these observations:

There they were, the Black Panthers from the ghetto and the black and white liberals from the middle, upper-middle and upper classes studying one another cautiously over the expensive furnishings, the elaborate flower arrangements, the cocktails and the silver trays of canapés.

As Rusher's earlier reference to vichyssoise makes clear, conservative populists had a profound understanding of the rhetorical value of elite cuisine, and they surely rejoiced when, as Wolfe states, the story went out on the Times' News Service wires and was published on the front page of newspapers in cities throughout the United States and Europe. Making matters worse for liberals, the Times the next day published an editorial entitled "False Note on Black Panthers," which Wolfe reprints in its entirety. The screed contains hostile lines such as "Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the - cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans," and belittling phrases including "group therapy plus fund-raising soiree" and "the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike." The editorial also takes up the issue of liberal guilt while denouncing such events as unserious: "It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice." It even slams the event as dishonoring the memory of Martin Luther King and asserts that "Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal" distorts the black image, and "Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful." Soon thereafter, Bernstein found himself being characterized as a "masochist" by the Right. William F. Buckley called the party, as Wolfe paraphrases him, "an object lesson in the weird masochism of the white liberal who bids the Panther come devour him in his 'luxurious lair.'" Bernstein told a reporter that the whole uproar had been "nauseating," he insisted the gathering had been a meeting to discuss the civil liberties of the defendants, and he denied being a member of any jet set or a masochist. He also found himself getting booed at his performances (by the middle class), and he made it publicly clear that he was opposed to the philosophy of the Black Panthers. News of the gathering even made it to President Nixon's desk via a memo (later leaked) from Daniel Patrick Moynihan updating him on the nation's racial climate. Wolfe imagines Nixon none too impressed, and I imagine Nixon plotting to use the soiree to win over the elevator operator and the doorman before Wallace got to them first.

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Through the Way Station To this end, Nixon would have turned to the oft-mentioned conservative strategist Kevin Phillips, who asserts in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, that the 1968 election marks the end of "the New Deal Democratic hegemony" because the GOP had changed drastically from the one unseated in 1932 and voters were fed up with the Democrats' "ambitious social programming" and their "inability to handle the urban and Negro " (25). Phillips argues that as the locus of GOP power shifted from the Northeast and upper Midwest to the South and the West, "the New Deal institutionalized into a nationally-dominant liberal Establishment, [and] the Democratic power base shifted to the Northeast, historically the seat of America's dominant economic, social, cultural and political elite" (26). In short, the liberals became the establishment as the conservatives became the populist outsiders, a shift facilitated by negative reactions by socially conservative whites to the Civil Rights Movement, which Phillips emphasizes throughout his study. Phillips claims that the Northeast traditionally upholds the politics and ideology of dominant but declining interests, and "The Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and New Deal upheavals all captured the White House against ballot opposition centered in the Northeast" (31). The 1968 coalition that put Nixon in office consisted of areas with insurgent histories, including the South (secession), the West ('s firebrand populism), Irish pockets of New York (the draft riots of 1863), and middle-class suburbia. As for the last one, Phillips predicts the future instead of citing history, and he describes America's sprawling suburban tracts as centers of "the emerging tax-revolt" (32). Each of these segments of the electorate, as Phillips delicately puts it, "were inclined to move away from, rather than towards, the emerging Negro- Establishment entente" and toward a new conservatism (32). With this in mind, Phillips points out the two drastically different parties Nixon represented in 1960 and 1968, an evolution triggered in large part by "the civil rights revolution," which finally alienated the Democrats from the South and drew the Northeast closer, while increasing the Republicans' inclination toward the South and West and inspiring them to "make an ideological bid for the anti-civil rights South" (32-33). Thus the Democrats, "having linked themselves to the Negro socioeconomic revolution and to an increasingly liberal Northeastern Establishment shaped by the success of the New Deal" (33), made themselves the target of a conservative populist uprising rooted in racial backlash and Middle American resentment because – yes – they indeed became the new Establishment, but also because, one might add, they did the right thing and supported the Civil Rights Movement. This combination accounts for the perception that upper tier liberals had aligned with impoverished and oppressed African Americans at the expense of white Middle America, and it goes a long way toward explaining why the South finally abandoned the Democratic Party. According to Phillips, "the Negrophobe Deep South and modern Outer South simultaneously abandoned the Democratic Party" (36). The precarious state of symbiosis Mencken described decades earlier had finally been upset. Phillips reads Nixon's election through a theoretical lens that posits thirty-two to thirty- six year political cycles. According to his interpretation, the modern system of politics began with Andrew Jackson's victory in 1828, which kicked off an era of Democratic dominance until Lincoln won in 1860. This began an era of Republican sway; however, Phillips stresses that after the Southern states had returned to the Union, the elections were basically deadlocked, and no president between 1876 and 1892 was able to secure a popular vote majority. The dual Democratic-Populist candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 made the Democratic Party seem one "of and revivalism," and the Republicans ruled from their industrial base

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in the Northeast and Great Lakes region until 1932, which began the New Deal era. In total, Phillips recounts four cycles lasting thirty-two or thirty-six years, and each one featured eight years when the subordinate party managed to grab power temporarily, such as 's two terms during the stretch of early Twentieth Century Republicanism and Eisenhower's two terms in the middle of the New Deal dominance (36-37). According to Phillips, the failure of the dominant party's ideology to cope with crisis spurs cyclical shifts, and he underscores the negative impact of racial issues on the Democrats' electoral fortunes. Phillips argues that the inability of the Republicans' laissez faire philosophy to deal with the Great Depression mirrors "the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it. Democratic 'Great Society' programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation" (37). Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism saw the federal government participating in realms into which it had previously not ventured until, by the time of LBJ's Great Society, this novel approach became "an institutionalized reflex" and "liberalism propounded federally controlled categorical grant-in-aid programs and bureaucratic social engineering as the answer to crises big and little" (38). Phillips argues that whereas the New Deal taxed the few to benefit many, the Great Society taxed the many to benefit the few, and there arose a general opposition by voters to a "welfare liberalism of the federal government" that spent their taxes on programs that did not benefit them (37). The activist federal government that began with FDR had, by the 1960s, involved itself with minority issues and set off a white backlash electorally beneficial to the Republican Party. The issue of race indeed permeates Phillips' analysis of the emergent Republican majority. He states that postwar migration of whites, including white ethnics who made up a key segment of the New Deal coalition, to the suburbs and Sun Belt parallels, and is partly a reaction to, the migration of Southern Blacks to Northern cities. According to Phillips, this migration made "the Negro problem" a national conflict rather than merely a local one, and now that Northern cities are nearly half black, the resultant new suburbia is a bulwark of white conservatism. Phillips adds that the growing Northern-based black political influence has led to civil rights legislation "obnoxious to the South" and social programs detested by the children of immigrants in the North (39). Phillips states that by the early 1960s the increase in nonwhite populations of Northeastern cities had led to significant racial friction, and the Black and Puerto Rican embrace of the Democratic Party weakened the control of Catholic city machines and created "sociopolitical demands" unpalatable to Catholic Democrats (72-74). As a result, many of the Irish, Italians, and Germans moved towards suburbia and the GOP, while the Establishment of the Northeast, "maintaining its historic opposition to the trend of the blue-collar and lower- middle-class Catholics," embraced liberalism (74). The Democratic Party of the ethnic Catholic machine had given way to a Reformist Democratic Party of, as Phillips puts it, "Protestant socialites and Jewish intellectuals" in alliance with minority groups (74), which goes some way toward explaining Mayor Lindsay's political base and how Leonard Bernstein ended up throwing a party for The Black Panthers. This new Liberal Establishment is key to Phillips' thesis, and he parses it at length. He emphasizes that its emergence does not suggest that the "old-line financial and industrial establishment" turned liberal; their influence was actually "displaced by a new collectivity of research, scientific, consulting, internationalist and social interests" that, because they relied on the expenditures of an active big government, perpetuated exactly such an ideology (88).

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Phillips' comparison of the old Conservative Establishment and the new Liberal one mirrors Rusher's distinction between the producers and the verbalists. On the side of the former are such interests as "sugar brokers, bulk press manufacturers, fuel distributors and insurance executives," while on the side of the latter we have "research directors, associate professors, social workers, educational consultants, urbanologists, development planners, journalists, brotherhood executives, foundation staffers, communications specialists, culture vendors, pornography merchants, poverty theorists and so forth who keynoted the silk-stocking liberal and Democratic trend" (88). And before one can catch their breath, Phillips adds that no other vocations have waxed as prosperous and multiplied as extensively "as the propagators of environmentalism […] and architects of the Permissive Society." As his claim about permissiveness might suggest, Phillips places responsibility for the social upheaval of the 1960s at the feet of these establishment interests. They all, Phillips argues, have generated an environment "in which the contrast between hypocritical humanism and socioeconomic reality has engendered youthful alienation and anarchy" (88), which explains, sort of, campus unrest. As for "the Negro Problem," which is always on hand in Phillips' analysis, "The Negro cause is a very useful adjunct of the Liberal Establishment." Blacks support the Democrats and liberal government, and "the Negro revolution and the 'urban crisis' provide much of the impetus for vast government urban planning, educational, welfare, social research and housing expenditures" (89). Such expenditures are key to segments of the Liberal Establishment who make their livings in this way. Phillips inevitably turns his attention toward the South and how it will serve as a foundation for Republican electoral dominance. He notes that a majority of the votes that Humphrey won below the Mason-Dixon line came from Black voters and, in an obviously related trend, "Southern whites are leaving the national Democratic party just as definitely as Negroes across the country are embracing it" (110). This movement started after the Second World War and took a major step when Deep South delegations failed to stop the civil rights proposals initiated by Mayor Hubert Humphrey during the 1948 Democratic Convention. Thus was born the movement centered in Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia that nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright as his running mate. The ticket carried Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama (197). Significantly, Goldwater would carry those same states, plus Georgia and his home state of Arizona, sixteen years later after he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wallace, in 1968, lost South Carolina to Nixon, whom Thurmond publicly supported, but carried Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana plus Arkansas. Looking at these trends with demographic precision, Phillips asserts that many poor whites in the Deep South were leery of the conservatism of Dixiecrat and Republican candidates, but by 1966 they had become increasingly alienated from the National Democratic Party. Economic concerns had kept them more or less in the Democratic fold, but, as Phillips puts it, "as liberalism metamorphosed from an economic populist stance—supporting farm, highway, health, education and pension expenditures against conservative budget-cutting—into a credo of social engineering, it lost the support of poor whites" (206). (In this context, social engineering should be read racial integration.) Phillips claims that conservatism adopted some degree of economic populism – he calls Wallace a "free-spending populist" (166) – and that, combined with the "Negro socioeconomic revolution," gave conservatives a chance to appeal to poor whites for the first time since Reconstruction (206). In 1968, Wallace beat Nixon throughout the Deep South, where the GOP ticket did well only in the cities. In the region as a whole,

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Humphrey barely captured twenty percent of the white votes in the eleven ex-Confederate states (207). From 1932 to 1968, the Democratic share of the total presidential vote in the Deep South declined from 90 to 26 percent, and in the outer South from 77 to 32. Phillips claims that only the Black shift toward the Democrats matches this drastic change (286). He also asserts that just as Thurmond and the Dixiecrat movement served many conservatives "as a way station" between the Democratic Party and the evolving GOP, Wallace will do the same for poor whites who "have lined up against newly enfranchised Negroes just as they did in the somewhat comparable of a century ago" (286). Phillips concludes by reasserting – presciently, it turns out – that Wallace is merely a way station for lifelong Democrats in the process of turning toward Republicanism (463). With this in mind, he cynically stresses that the Nixon administration should enforce civil rights and ensure that the voting rights of Southern Blacks are maintained. Doing so will pressure Southern conservative laggards who have not already switched to the GOP to do so because of the strength Blacks are gaining in the Democratic Party in some "Black Belt" areas (464). To solidify support among Northern blue-collar workers, Phillips advocates "moderate conservatism," meaning that Nixon can attract and keep socially conservative Democrats and senior citizens who ultimately voted for Humphrey for fear "that a Republican administration would undermine Social Security, Medicare, collective bargaining and aid to education." He adds that the GOP "is becoming much more lower-middle class and much less establishmentarian" than it was even during the 1950s, and pursuit of the blue-collar and Catholic electorate of the North would further the trend (464). The approach to bread-and-butter issues Phillips recommends obviously anticipates The Real Majority, for Scammon and Wattenberg basically crafted a version of Phillip's thesis for Democratic politicians. Interestingly, in 1990 Phillips would publish The Politics of Rich and Poor, a book lambasting Reagan's economic policies for resulting in the concentration of wealth in the top tier at the expense of the middle and lower classes. In that screed, Phillips anticipates another populist uprising, this one of an economic variety. In his conclusion of The Emerging Republican Majority, by contrast, Phillips reads the revolt as culturally conservative and led by Americans who have been elevated – by, one might add, successful New Deal policies – to the middle-class. Phillips argues that liberals remain in denial about the country's conservative trend, and that 1968 represents a shift away from the usual suspects of social engineering from the bench, permissiveness, and experiments in the realms of housing and welfare designed to fund liberal institutions and strengthen the hold of liberal ideology (469-71). This idea of social conservatism versus social engineering is key, for it relates to the approach to government programs Phillips recommends the GOP adopt. In his review of Phillips' book for Commentary magazine, author Andrew Hacker misses this point. Hacker asserts that in appealing to the new suburbanites of the emerging middle class,

it would be a mistake to assume that they oppose federal spending and government subsidies. Phillips commits this error when he opines that "Wallace's vote would probably have dipped much lower had Richard Nixon chosen to rally aberrant multitudes of 1964 Goldwater backers by sounding the anti-Great Society clarion…"

Hacker goes on to state that a large majority of voters favor government programs that assist the middle class, such as Medicare, education aid, and consumer protection. He adds that such voters are also protective of Social Security and hardly in favor of privatizing the Valley

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Authority. In short, voters want some form of government activism, and they want a social safety net in place. According to Robert Mason, Phillips read Hacker's review and wrote in the margin, "For 'Great Society,' read social engineering, not Medicare, social security or aid to education." Phillips sought to combine populist economics with cultural populism, and Mason states that he clarified these points in the preface to the paperback edition (49). Hacker also predicts an emerging class struggle between its establishment from the middle- and upper-classes of society and the blue-collar types from the lower-middle-classes it hoped to draw. Rusher downplayed this potential conflict by focusing on the patriotism of the producers aligning against the blame-America-first verbalists, while Hart recognized the schism between the National Review elites and the Joe Six-Pack and NASCAR crowd. Hacker, for his part, seems to get a chuckle from the image of Republican Party dinners being "held in American Legion halls rather than at the local Sheraton Inn, with GOP burghers forgoing their martinis in favor of beer." In another rat-a-tat of class signifiers, he adds that "Phillips seems willing to have the catering done by Fried Chicken, but I am not sure how many other Republicans have an appetite for paper cups and plastic plates." Ronald Reagan's political triumphs resulted from an interpersonal dexterity that enabled him to be visibly at ease with both the Sheraton Inn and paper cup crowds. Reagan also benefited from having no qualms about updating Nixon's Southern Strategy for the 1980s. Despite David Brooks' claims, in his 2007 "History and Calumny" column, that the truth is more complicated, the fact remains that on August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan made his first post-convention speech at the Neshoba County Fair, just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered sixteen years before. Reagan told the crowd in the context of a discussion about welfare, the federal bureaucracy, and education:

I believe in states' rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and the private level, and I believe that we distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities, and to restore to state and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

Of course the former governor's use of the term "establishment" was designed to hit a populist chord. As for the racial issue, Time writer Jack White argues that "states' rights" was a coded phrase designed to be understood by Southern white voters resisting recent black advances. Brooks, by contrast, claims with a straight face that the speech occurred in the midst of a series of moves designed to court black voters, including addressing the Urban League, touring the South Bronx, and meeting the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines. He asserts that allegations that Reagan's speech was a wink and a nudge to Southern bigots is a partisan slur and a distortion, but does acknowledge that his use of the phrase "states' rights" in the context of Philadelphia, Mississippi was "callous." He also admits that Reagan could have "done something wonderful" by mentioning civil rights but didn't, and then affirms that "it's obviously true that race played a role in the GOP's ascent." Brooks takes the air out of his own tires with those admissions, and his point about race and the rise of the Republicans' electoral fortunes should seem obvious in light of the context I have worked to establish with this project. I discussed the plan of action Rusher proposed in the early sixties for his party to win over Southern voters, I highlighted Phillips' various strategies to

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utilize civil rights advances to complete the white Southerner's transition from Democrat to Republican, and in my next chapter I will call attention to the demagoguery inherent in the various refusals to heed the call of the Kerner Commission to consider the urban riots sociologically. It is with Rusher and Phillips in mind especially that I turn my attention toward The Southern Strategy, by Reg Murphy and Hal Gulliver. Published in 1971, the book largely deals with the results of the interim election of 1970, the success or failure of Nixon's so-called Southern Strategy, and the changing landscape of Southern politics as a whole. The authors' narrative begins with Nixon's 1968 campaign, specifically the narrow path he had to negotiate to court Southern whites without scaring off Northern moderates. Murphy and Gulliver accuse Nixon of possessing "a cynical willingness" to appeal to the dark side of the Southern spirit in general and cultivate support among white Southern segregationists in particular. They assert that the candidate used careful phrasing to suggest he would slow down, perhaps even reverse, the process of school desegregation in the region. His careful phrasing, they claim, ensured that none of his quotations could be used against him outside of the South. The authors insist that since modern politics consists of , symbols, and code words, most white and black voters in the South understood precisely what the former vice president was articulating. And, they add insinuatingly, men like Strom Thurmond, who had endorsed Nixon, made the coded messages all the more clear (23). Perlstein describes how Nixon shored up the 1968 nomination by courting Thurmond, who had completed his change of allegiance to the GOP four years earlier. The South Carolina Senator had installed Harry Dent, his top aide, as the chair of the state Republican Party, and Dent corralled the other Southern chairmen into voting as a bloc at the 1968 convention. Nixon made his pitch to the bloc in late spring, but when they failed to be swayed by his spiel, he put in a call to Thurmond. The Senator told Nixon he could ensure his first-ballot nomination if he made him some promises, which included that he would nominate only strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, that he would consult with him on a choice for vice president who would be acceptable to all factions of the party (meaning no Rockefeller types), and that he would protect his state's textile industry from cheap Japanese imports. Nixon made the promises, and Thurmond, the Democrat turned Dixiecrat turned Republican, publicly endorsed him three weeks later (89, 284-85). According to Murphy and Gulliver, Nixon was interviewed that September for a program broadcast in both Carolinas. In it, he stated clearly that he agreed with the 1954 Brown decision that outlawed school desegregation, and he criticized "freedom-of-choice" school programs if such plans were designed to continue segregation. But he called withholding federal funds from school districts that refused to integrate their schools "dangerous policy." He argued that the practice of using the treasury to carry out the Brown decision gave the federal government and federal courts the responsibility "to, in effect, act as local school districts," and he argued that using federal money in such a way was "going too far." The authors contend that this was shrewd politicking, for "going too far" was the exact words many white Southerners used in reference to federal court decisions and civil rights legislation, and cutting off funds was the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's (HEW) main component of power in enforcing its guidelines (23-24). Perlstein describes "freedom-of-choice" plans as the practice of allowing black families "to file individual requests to enroll their children in white schools." These requests were worthless, Perlstein explains, because they were likely to be followed by a white man, holding up a car loan or home lease as a threat, asking if there had been some sort of mistake. In short, "Not

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a single school district with a freedom of choice plan had subsequently integrated," and only 6 percent of schoolchildren in the entire South attended school with children of another race by the end of 1965 (133-134). Murphy and Gulliver's perspective on freedom of choice is less staunch, but not by much. They note that although in some cases local school districts adopted such plans and implemented them with honest intentions, many used the schemes as a phony means of complying with the law. Nixon carefully suggested he did not believe in plans designed to continue school segregation, but he "held out hope that freedom-of-choice plans might be permitted if they included some token desegregation" (24). Thurmond made television commercials that autumn in which he endorsed Nixon and stated that his candidate supported freedom-of-choice plans, and Nixon carried South Carolina by a narrow margin (which is to say, he defeated Wallace). After his win, Nixon installed Harry Dent in the White House as a political strategist (24-25). An early Southern drama in the new president's White House concerned the HEW regional office located in Atlanta, which administered programs in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee and was run by William J. (Pete) Page, Jr. Of these, Tennessee, Florida, and South Carolina went with Nixon in 1968, and the other three went with Wallace. Republican Party chairmen from each of these states held a private meeting soon after the inauguration and agreed on the goal of firing Page. The administrator was not a political appointee; he was a civil servant with an excellent record, and was considered a strong and progressive administrator, especially with civil rights and welfare programs. The Southern Republicans were said to object to him less personally than symbolically: "He was the HEW regional director at the top level of enforcement of school desegregation guidelines. Not to mention administrator of welfare and other federal programs, programs not really beloved by many GOP leaders in the New South" (26-27). Desegregation and federal programs combined in April 1966, when Page demanded that regional hospitals be desegregated by July 1 in order to meet Medicare standards (29-30). Despite his inclination to urge the expansion of such federal programs as food stamps and the distribution of surplus food, Page was by no means a "knee-jerk liberal." The authors describe him as "intent on enforcing the law," while fully appreciating "the flavor and complexity of individual community problems" (31-32). Despite these dual burdens of integrity and competence, the Southern GOP got their way, and Page was "kicked upstairs" in August (33). His deputy, Robert Brown, followed him up to Washington two months later (34). As with the section dealing with the campaign, when the discussion focused on "coded language," there is nothing concrete about the Page drama. He was a symbol of progress who could not be fired, only shuffled. The progress he signified could not be reversed, for he was an administrator, not a legislator (or "activist judge"). The account reads as if the chairmen wanted merely to show their influence with the White House and hence their increasing power in the region. The president seems to have been playing a game to enhance his political standing rather than to have a real and substantial impact on policy. In this political netherworld of signals, symbols, and shadows on the wall, Nixon could appear to be fighting the good fight against liberals in Congress, judges legislating from the bench, and arrogant pencil-pushers in the bureaucracy so he could align himself with opponents of segregation and harness the energy of resentment for his political gain. All the while, however, the inevitable remained just that. Nixon's political genius in the South was to calculate how to gain politically by appearing to take up with the losing side. For example, Murphy and Gulliver contend that it is not likely that anybody in the administration's inner circle believed that the wheels of school integration could be reversed.

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Many in the GOP, though, especially the Southern branch, believed the president could at least slow them down and benefit politically in the process (50). Evidence of the extent to which the administration was willing to politicize the race issue appeared in the Washington Post in March 1970, when the paper printed a copy of a memo from the previous May, a mere four months into Nixon's first term (53). The missive sent to Harry Dent came from the Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, G. Paul Jones, and its subject was Washington County, a small, rural school district that had its funds cut off by HEW for their failure to integrate its schools. Part of the memo read:

It is quite important that this thing be reversed…. been given assurance by some very wealthy individuals who are in a position to contribute substantially to the Republican party that they will make substantial contributions and that there will be little financial worry for the Republican party in Georgia if the school situation in Washington County can be worked out. (54)

Murphy and Gulliver point out that the revealing aspect of the memo is that a GOP chair from a Southern state felt confident that the administration would influence a HEW decision on school desegregation in order to raise money for the party. The Post uncovered two other such memos, dealing with Dent's home district in South Carolina and a school district in Louisiana respectively, that Dent forwarded to HEW Secretary Robert H. Finch. Jones told reporters that he could not recall writing such a memo, but stated that as far as he knew no contributions had been made to the Georgia GOP because the situation in Washington County had not been worked out. As for Dent, he refused to comment on the missives, stating "I'm not going to play the memo game" (54-55). Such acts as receiving, reading, and forwarding clandestine memos brimming with hints and insinuations tend to occur, for the most, out of the public's field of vision. However, in August 1969, the Nixon Administration took overt action when, after federal courts decreed that a number of Mississippi school boards work with advisers from HEW to draw up plans to carry out the integration of their schools, said plans were submitted to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. These plans worked out the desegregation process of thirty Mississippi school districts to begin in September with the opening of the school year. Then, in a sudden reversal, Secretary Finch composed a letter to the judges asking them to allow for a delay of action until December to avoid "chaos, confusion and a catastrophic educational set-back." The federal government appeared in court in late August appealing for the delay, which the Court of Appeals granted (57- 58). The Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) ran a full-page ad in the September 3, 1969 edition of the New York Times in which they declared that the government of the United States broke its promise to the children of Mississippi (Brown in 1954) while making the excellent point that, for the first time, the federal government went to court to ask that segregation be allowed to continue (58). The NAACP lawyers appealed, and in late October the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Fifth Circuit Court's decision to allow the delay and instructed them to order the immediate desegregation of the districts in question. The Fifth Circuit Court reviewed the case, and ruled that twenty-seven of the thirty school districts had to put the integration plans into action by the last day of December, and the other three, having particularly difficult obstacles, had to have a partial plan in effect by January and complete desegregation by the following

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September. Ironically, the August action taken by the Nixon Administration to delay school desegregation led to this October decision, Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which updated and accentuated a key phrase from the Brown case, "all deliberate speed" (59). They sought to solidify political alliances by slowing the rate of integration, but in the end they sped it up. However, since the administration was, politically speaking, trying to move Wallace voters through the way station into the GOP ranks, such a "defeat" likely highlighted the battle lines and the side on which the new Republican Party stood. By his second year in office, Nixon had realized the inevitability of the courts' stance on integration. Thus the Justice Department worked closely with HEW to expedite school desegregation while politically the White House put the responsibility on the judiciary. In the spring of 1970, former governor George Wallace won the Alabama gubernatorial primary, which increased the likelihood he would run for president again in 1972. This development encouraged the Nixon team to push for complete desegregation by that autumn, the logic being that if the full brunt was felt then, the sting would have lessened by the time the president was up for reelection (61-62). It is worthwhile to state again that The Southern Strategy was published in 1971. The Watergate break-in had not yet occurred, Wallace was a year away from being paralyzed by an assassin's bullet, and there is even a chapter about the 1970 Georgia gubernatorial campaign called "Jimmy Who?" about a peanut farmer who managed to win an upset victory. All this is to say that school desegregation was still a very current event, and emotions were raw. With this in mind, Murphy and Gulliver take Nixon to task for using the issue as a political tool as he did. They acknowledge that many white Southern citizens probably were, as the phrase bandied about put it, "reluctant integrationists." However, they were willing to obey the law and convince other whites to do the same. The authors also assert that whites in the region were coming to grips with the injustices perpetrated against blacks and the specific unfairness of segregation. They write that like most people, white Southerners want to be fair and decent, which created a level of willingness to pursue desegregation, a willingness that did not exist a decade before. Thus, "the terrible cruelty of the Nixon administration's indecision on school desegregation was that it gave direct encouragement to those white Southerners least reconciled to the ending of an era" (66). And there was another, much larger group of troubled Southerners, frustrated and troubled by the pace of change over the previous decade. They had come to grips with the changes as inevitable, and had been facing it with grace, but Nixon gave them reason to hope "that the clock could be turned back, that at the very least the direction of change could be somewhat altered, the movement of it slowed down, that quite possibly, for instance, some form of token integration might satisfy the laws and the courts." Had he not said that the federal government should leave the running of school districts to the localities themselves? And had he not also called the withholding of federal money to districts refusing to integrate "dangerous policy" (67)? The authors carefully state that they seriously doubt Nixon considered himself a segregationist, and they expound upon their use of the word calculatedly when discussing Nixon and his approach to the issue, as in, "He calculatedly led many white Southerners to believe that, at heart, the president of the United States and George Corley Wallace had a lot in common" (70). One of the things the two had in common were the constituents they courted. In addition to Wallace's appeal to Southern integrationists of various degrees of reluctance, many were concerned about the impact he was having up North. After Wallace won the 1970 primary and ensured his place on the national stage, a consultant on urban problems warned a gathering of Catholic priests during the Workshop on Urban Ethnic Community Development that "If we

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don't get these people first, Wallace will" (105). An Italian monsignor rhetorically asked: "Who's speaking for the working man today? It's Wallace and Spiro Agnew, because Lindsay and [Urban Coalition Director John] Gardner and other liberals are ignoring a whole group," and another speaker asserted that "The emotions of white ethnics are tinder that will ignite positively or negatively in a time of crisis." Murphy and Gulliver explicitly share the speakers' concerns about the sentiments of workers in the South and North, and they argue that "those Alabamians who voted for him were not as different from the hard hats that marched on the New York City Hall as many tried to pretend." (Please see Chapter Four for a discussion of these so-called hard hats.) To both camps, the authors argue, Wallace represents patriotism and a support of tradition, and he holds the key to middle-class frustrations. Nixon also attempted to appeal to the frustrated Southern voter – and probably gained politically while losing tactically – by putting forth nominees from Dixie to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Late in 1969 the president nominated Clement Haynsworth, who hailed from South Carolina. Haynsworth was shown to be hostile to the interests of labor and prone to conflicts of interest. The judge served on the board of directors of a company that did business with a firm involved in a case on which he was voting, and his broker bought stock in another company with a case before the judge during the time between the end of the trial and Haynsworth's decision. Although nobody ever showed that the judge made any money from the transactions, and nobody established that Haynsworth and his broker had ever been in contact about them, it established him as careless and his nomination was rejected (131-32). Soon thereafter, in early 1970, Nixon took another shot with G. Harrold Carswell, who was born in southern Georgia and spent most of his public life in Florida. As a young law school graduate running for the Georgia legislature in the late 1940s, Carswell made a staunchly white supremacist, pro-segregation speech that was published in a local weekly. As one might guess, this weekly appeared twenty-plus years later, and before long Carswell was regarded as a racist (132-33). His intelligence also became an issue. In one of the funniest passages on the Carswell drama, Murphy and Gulliver describe how the nominee was hurt worse by his supporters than his nemeses. Republican Roman Hruska, arguing Carswell's case to his fellow senators, claimed "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandieses and Frankfurters and Cardozos and stuff like that there" (that five-word tag at the end really makes the quotation). Apparently, what was especially detrimental was the notion of the judge's mediocrity, which was indicated mostly by his record: 57 percent of his decisions, according to one study, had been reversed by a higher court (135). Which is not to say that the race issue did not hurt, too. He claimed to be "aghast" at his speech when the weekly that published it was unearthed, and he stated that he now had "no notions, secretive, open, or otherwise, of racial superiority" (135-36). Still, Carswell was discovered to be involved in a segregated country club, and he partook in a land agreement that stipulated that blacks could not buy homes in his neighborhood. In 1966, he sold a lot with the provision that it could not be owned, operated, or even used by anybody not a member "of the Caucasian race" (136). One day he told the Senate he knew about the racial policy of his country club, but the next he said he did not. He also allowed his former law partner's letter of endorsement to be entered into the record despite having received a call from him stating that he could no longer testify on his behalf (137).

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Carswell's nomination was defeated 51-45 in April, and the GOP played the region card. Senator George D. Aiken, a Vermont Republican, claimed "We'll never be able to get one who'll be good enough for the people of the North. Judge Carswell was good enough for Dogpatch, but not good enough for New Haven" (139). Nixon, the day after the vote, lumped the fates of Carswell and Haynsworth together, claiming both men suffered "vicious assaults on their intelligence, on their honesty and on their character." The president also stated that both men had been charged with being racists, but the real cause of their rejection, Nixon claimed, was that both nominees, like him, held a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. They were also voted down for "the accident of their birth, the fact that they were born in the South." Playing up the moment, Nixon expressed his with Southerners and his hope that one day they would overcome:

I understand the bitter feeling of millions of Americans who live in the South at the act of regional discrimination that took place in the Senate yesterday. They have my assurance that the day will come when men like Judges Carswell and Haynsworth can and will sit on the high court. (139)

Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright countered that regional concerns were of no importance in the case of either nominee, and he offered to suggest Southerners who could make it to the Court with little opposition. The authors contend that other Southern voters were frustrated that Nixon failed to present the best their region had to offer (140). Yet other Southerners doubted, despite the assurances of pundits, that party and region had nothing to do with the nominees' respective disgraces, and they were certain that if they had risen through the ranks in a Northern state, their outcomes would have been favorable (140). Murphy and Gulliver assert that Southern whites "had a peculiar view" of the nomination processes, and they felt as if they had more change foisted upon them than any other region over the course of the past sixteen years: "Wherever the white Southerners looked, they found that they had to give up their strongest beliefs if they were to participate in the life of the nation" (137). These are the feelings Nixon sought to tap into with his statement following Carswell's defeat, a statement in which he out-Wallaced George Wallace. These are also the feelings that made the nominations of both Haynsworth and Carswell, politically speaking, win-win situations for the president, and he hoped his momentum would carry into the midterm elections.

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The 1970 Midterm Elections and Perspectives on the Post-New Deal Democratic Party By 1970, The Social Issue had gained considerable traction, and Agnew was a major player in highlighting it as an important part of the midterm campaign. Vulnerable Democrats such as Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr. were vulnerable, so he donned a flag pin and tried to run on such bread-and-butter-issues as Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Gore scored points in a televised debate by hitting Congressman , his opponent, on his record of voting against ten bills containing veterans benefits and against another thirteen bills for federal aid to education (Murphy and Gulliver 112). Brock countered by emphasizing issues that dealt in some way with the Supreme Court, the first being Gore's votes against the confirmations of Haynsworth and Carswell. The second was school desegregation, which by then had been boiled down to the phrase busing, the fear being that school children would be bused long distances to achieve racial parity in individual schools. Brock insistently stated Gore favored it. The third also dealt directly with schools: the Dirksen amendment (123). According to Murphy and Gulliver, the Dirksen amendment "ostensibly was aimed at putting prayer back in the public schools and overruling a Supreme Court decision on the matter." As the authors explain the original ruling, the Court had never "outlawed" prayer; they merely "ruled that pupils could not be required to use a specific prayer prepared by school officials." Since the ruling clearly stated that the state does not have the power to determine what sort of prayer an individual should pray, the did more to uphold freedom of religion than to banish prayer from the classroom. The authors argue that the decision is likely the most misunderstood ruling of the mid-twentieth century, and they assert that politicians who usually knew better "chose to exploit this as an emotional issue" (124). Brock was one of these men, and so was conservative Democrat Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr., who used the issue to defeat liberal incumbent Senator Ralph Yarborough in the Texas primary. Bentsen spent millions, much of it going to a last-minute barrage of ads harping on prayer in schools. According to Yarborough, "They had pictures of me with a rubber stamp saying 'no' over the word prayer," which he added was "an utter lie." An employee of the agency that concocted the ads said such techniques work well on Fundamentalists, "particularly those in " (124). The authors add that Brock ran a similar blitz in the closing days of the Tennessee general election with similar success. Murphy and Gulliver contend that Gore's was "the one Democratic Southern scalp of any consequence claimed by national Republicans" in 1970 (127). From the GOP's perspective, the elections as a whole were unsuccessful, and that year's returns offer evidence that The Social Issue does not trump financial concerns when the economy is particularly bad off. There was a recession in 1970, and The Social Issue did not play up to expectations. would likely have been clobbered by it (the draft, the marijuana, the affairs) in 1992 had the economy not been in trouble, and surely the financial crisis of 2008 rendered the Social Issue-based attacks on (his race, his middle name, his former preacher, his remark uttered in San Francisco about working-class people clinging to guns and religion) much less potent than they would have been in less treacherous economic times. Other authors discuss the role of the Social Issue in the 1970 elections and offer different interpretations of the outcomes. Mason notes that sitting presidents rarely see their parties make congressional gains during midterm elections, and thus describes Nixon's personal involvement in the campaign as a gamble. Adding to the was the state of the economy, "but Nixon believed that he could mobilize members of the 'silent majority' by sidestepping any debate about the economy and instead focusing attention on a different set of issues" (77). With the midterm elections in sight, Democrats came up with the tag "" to associate the unfavorable

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state of the economy with the president, while Nixon sought to emphasize patriotism and his traditionalist stance against permissiveness (81). This is the planning stage during which Haldeman recorded the phrase "patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed." Mason states that many analysts argue that Scammon and Wattenberg's The Real Majority, which came out right before the start of the campaigns, had an impact on Nixon's strategy. "In fact," Mason asserts, "Nixon had already decided to appeal for the votes of the silent majority through themes of patriotism and antipermissiveness, and he saw the book's argument as supporting this decision" (82). Much of Mason's discussion of The Real Majority focuses on the White House's interpretation of its main points. Mason sets this up by emphasizing that Scammon and Wattenberg argued that Democrats should become more conservative on The Social Issue and that Republicans should become more liberal on economic issues and embrace an activist government approach to the economy to capture the center (83). Buchanan wrote up an analysis of the book for Nixon, who in turn ordered Buchanan's work distributed throughout the administration and to GOP candidates. According to Mason, Nixon scribbled the phrase "of course" in the margin next to Buchanan's summary of a key point of the book: "progressivism on economic issues and toughness on the Social Issue" (84). He contends that Buchanan's memo and Nixon's scrawled concurrence was as far as this economic approach went during the campaign, though: "once observed by Buchanan and Nixon, the recognition that 'economic progressivism' was important immediately disappeared from the campaign debate" (85). As for the other end of the political spectrum, Nixon noticed The Real Majority's apparent impact on liberals. For example, after its publication he pointed out to Haldeman Senator George McGovern's attack on radicals. The president hoped to continue to stress his own conservatism on The Social Issue as a contrast to what he saw as Democrats' insincerity (recall Agnew's "Come-Lately Club" remarks in Nevada), and Mason cites Haldeman's diaries, in which he recorded the president as saying he thought it important "to hit pornography, dope, [and] bad kids" (86). In Ohio, Senate Republican candidate Robert Taft, Jr. described his opponent, Howard Metzenbaum, as an "ultraliberal" soft on campus disorder and crime, but Metzenbaum stuck with bread-and-butter issues and declared his belief that "unemployment is un-American." Taft actually charged during a debate that Metzenbaum had read The Real Majority and was following its advice (102-03). In , Adlai Stevenson III, the Democratic challenger for that state's Senate seat, denied charges that he was a radical, and he conspicuously wore a flag pin. Having earlier, in what he thought was a different climate, criticized the actions of the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Stevenson made it clear he opposed violence whether perpetrated by the police, white students, or Black Panthers (103). Democrats in Congress, wise to Nixon’s strategy, passed four major anticrime bills during the run-up to the election (92). Democrats had obviously realized that the country, at least socially, had swung rightward, and they were adjusting their rhetoric, accessorizing their lapels, and writing their legislation accordingly. Nixon himself hit key states during the campaign in hopes of proving his and his party's socially conservative credibility. When the president arrived in Burlington, Vermont, a protester threw a small piece of concrete at him, and Nixon used the incident to hammer home his points on the Social Issue. According to Mason, the president's speech included an attack on a small group in the country that shouts obscenities and throws rocks before really hitting the patriotism theme against "a group of people that always tear America down; a group of people that hate this country, actually, in terms of what it presently stands for; who see nothing right with America"

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(108). Nixon thrived on confrontations with protesters, for they were the foils he needed to illustrate his points about the dangers radical liberalism posed to the nation. With this in mind, Mason adds that the president instructed his advance team to allow protesters into his appearances. Nixon emphasized other components of the Social Issue as well, including "smut," a word that sounds a lot dirtier and more sinister than the more clinical sounding "pornography." Nixon railed against the findings of the aforementioned commission on obscenity and pornography, which favored liberalizing laws restricting pornographic materials. But as much as evidence of increasing permissiveness seemed to have disgusted him, it was the shaggy war protester who truly served as Nixon's rhetorical arch-villain. In San Jose, just days before the election, Nixon exited the auditorium and saw a band of demonstrators. In a move that probably terrified his Secret Service agents, the president jumped onto the of his car and gave the protesters his Nixon V gesture (Mason 108). Perlstein offers a bit more detail on the San Jose incident. He writes that a minimum of a thousand protesters had tried but failed to storm the doors of the hall. Haldeman, dismayed at the lack of hecklers during his boss's speech, arranged for a between the end of the address and the commencement of the motorcade so that the demonstrators could amass. His version also has Nixon jumping onto the car, and he adds that he jutted out his chin and told his handlers, "That's what they hate to see!" The protesters, oblivious to being baited, threw on cue rocks, flags, and even candles from their vigil. Nixon's handlers played up the incident in the press, and it featured prominently in his culminating address in Arizona (534). Evidence indicates that the Nixon team indulged this strategy well beyond the 1970 elections. Hodgson cites transcripts from Watergate hearings held in August 1973, when Republican Senator questioned Haldeman about annotations he made on an intelligence report prepared in advance of Nixon's October 1971 visit to North Carolina. In the passage stating that there would likely be violent demonstrations and extremely obscene signs, Haldeman had underlined the word violent and, next to the word obscene, wrote Good. There was also data in the report suggesting that such acts were going to be directed at the Reverend , which inspired Haldeman to note Great. Hodgson argues that the administration's goal was to portray those opposing Nixon as militants, radicals, and hippies so that he could solidify his Middle American support. I would add that this is precisely what unnerved Nixon about increasingly mainstream demonstrations such as the Moratorium, which he and his vice president accordingly worked to redefine as dreamed up by radical, and even treasonous, elites. Hodgson also states that "The heart of Nixon's strategy was to distract attention from the causes of dissent and to campaign against the dissenters themselves" (425). In addition to Watergate transcripts, Hodgson also draws on a Fortune article detailing Nixon's (and Phillip's) strategy to establish a new majority. The article's author, A. James Reichley, cites a University of study showing that over half of white middle-class voters who categorized themselves as doves were simultaneously critical of "active antiwar protesters" (73). Although Reichley fails to put forth criteria for the terms middle-class and active, he does establish how a president administering an overwhelmingly unpopular war could benefit from over-the-top protests and protesters that mainstream doves found, as Perlstein would put it, aesthetically disgusting. Nevertheless, the Democrats pretty much won the 1970 election. According to Mason, they gained nine seats in the House, but lost two to the GOP in the Senate. There were forty-five gubernatorial races that year, and the GOP lost control of eleven, making the total 29-21 in favor of the Democrats. Although Nixon had attributed his party's showing to local issues, Mason

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explains that of the thirty-six candidates in twenty-one states for whom Nixon personally stumped, two out of three lost. Of the ten members of the House he recruited to run for the Senate, only three won. Mason interprets the results as indicating that stressing the Social Issue was not enough to offset pressing economic concerns and that many Democrats successfully escaped the "radical liberal" label (110-111). Other writers offer different takes on the election and the relationship between the Social Issue and the economy. Tom Wicker succinctly states: "Political overkill on the law-and-order issue by both Agnew and the president had left their candidates vulnerable on the recession issue" (638). Coyne puts forth a different reading and counters charges that the blame for the GOP's paltry showing should be pinned on Agnew. For one, he argues that Agnew was heavily involved in Conservative Party candidate James Buckley's (brother of William F.) Senate victory in New York's three-party contest. Coyne argues that Buckley won largely because of the Social Issue and Agnew's articulation of it on his behalf. Discussing other races, Coyne cites conservative writer Harry Jaffa, who predicted "that as this campaign progresses, many Democrats will begin their addresses by denouncing Mr. Agnew, while devoting the remainder of their speeches to paraphrasing him." Coyne claims Jaffa was correct, and he cites as evidence Stevenson's flag pin and call for a crackdown on rioters. Coyne also claims that in the Autumn of 1970 "Ted Kennedy began to sound like George Wallace with a Harvard accent" (240). In other words, the Democrats survived by presenting themselves as socially conservative. The GOP train went off the rails, as Coyne tells the story, as the unemployment rate continued to rise through October. In California in particular, "where a new coalition between traditionally Democratic workingmen and conservative Republicans had been operating effectively since 1966, unemployment in the building trades passed twenty percent" (140). New Deal Democrats conservative on the social issue (Coyne does not capitalize the phrase) began to feel the strain and by the time election day rolled around, the economy trumped all other concerns. As Coyne put it, "The specter of once again stalked the land, and traditional Democrats voted Democrat once more" (140). The economic problems spread from California on eastward, but strategists in the White House insisted on ignoring the economy and stressing the social issue. Coyne asserts that Agnew and his staff disagreed, and the vice president wanted to explain that the economic conditions were the result of "the wild spending" of the two previous Democratic administrations, which was exacerbated by the displacement wrought by the de-escalation of the Vietnam War. Agnew argued that since Nixon took office and began winding down the war, 400,000 former soldiers were released into the job market as a decline in military spending cut defense jobs by another 800,000. Agnew wanted to stress the irony of political doves ridiculing the president for his handling of the economy. To be clear, Coyne notes, Agnew wanted to make these points in addition to the social issue, but the White House reluctantly left the economy out of the debate (141). In his memoirs, Nixon recounts receiving Buchanan's memorandum on The Real Majority, and he describes the book's goal as trying "to persuade Democrats to stop playing so heavily to the fashionable but unrepresentative constituencies of the young, the poor, the racial minorities, and the students." Nixon describes agreeing with Buchanan on their counterstrategy, to get the Democrats on the defensive on the Social Issue (Nixon capitalizes the phrase), and to aim the GOP's rhetoric "at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class ethnics." Nixon claims that the problem was that "we had peaked too early on the Social Issue," and he wryly adds that "Democrats know how to read too, and they had obviously taken the lessons of The Real Majority to heart" (491). He cites specifics, such as Adlai Stevenson III's

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speech about his own war record and liberal politicians' embrace of law and order. Nixon also notes that the Democrats "unleashed a full-scale attack on us about the economy, which was undeniably having problems" (491-92). He concludes his thoughts on the 1970 elections by arguing that even though, as he puts it, "our first efforts to consolidate a constituency based on the Social Issue had met with only mixed success, I still felt that the basic strategy was right" (495). The former president also blames "lackluster" Republicans for their losses, and claimed two major (unnamed) GOP candidates had lost due to their involvement in scandals. Despite arguing on the correctness of the Social Issue strategy and the scandal-plagued, lusterless tendencies of some Republican candidates, Nixon is said to have told Haldeman during a meeting on his reelection campaign: "I really want the economy to boom beginning in July '72." And he was indifferent to how that goal was to be accomplished (Perlstein 537). On the presidential level, 1972 continued a Democratic drought that would continue with only one interruption (Carter in 1976) until Clinton won twenty years later. Tellingly, both Clinton and Carter were rooted in the South, and both presented themselves as moderates. They were playing on Republican turf. With these electoral conditions in mind, Jonathan Rieder offers his take on "The Rise of the 'Silent Majority,'" part of a collection of essays entitled The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. He covers much of the ground that I have above, including the rise of the notion of "Middle America" and its, as he puts it, "rhetorical foil, 'limousine liberalism'" (244). Taking a page from Phillips, whom he cites, he further argues that the civil rights revolution did more than anything else to shake the New Deal coalition to its foundation, and he offers some fascinating statistics on George Wallace's campaigns that show its impact on the Democratic New Deal majority. During the 1964 Democratic primaries, when Wallace boasted he would make race the basis of politics across the country, he scored between 30 and 45 percent of the vote in working- class precincts of Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Cleveland (254). In the 1968 general election, Wallace won the Deep South and Nixon won the Outer. With Wallace out of the picture in 1972, Nixon won the South in its entirety. Nixon garnered a majority of white working-class votes, and he won 80 percent of the Democratic voters who voted for Wallace four years before (262-63), a strong indication that Wallace was indeed a way station for disaffected white workers migrating from the Democratic Party to the GOP. Nixon actually won, with the exception of Massachusetts, the entire country. Despite the bump in the road that was the 1970 midterm elections, the president's hopes for a new majority seemed to be coming to fruition, and the Democrats seemed to be headed, if not the way of the Whigs, then at least back to minority status. Rieder also states that white support for civil rights had been growing steadily during the 1960s until the Watts riots in 1965. After the televised images of blacks chanting "burn, baby, burn" aired across the nation (these are the images with which Perlstein begins his book), the bottom fell out of white support for the demands of blacks, and the percentage of whites who believed that the Civil Rights Movement was proceeding too fast jumped accordingly (256). Focusing on ethnic Democrats, Rieder argues that "their moral traditionalism stoked contempt for transgression," and "little in their culture" allowed the typical working-class ethnic Democrat to consider "the sociological causes of drug addiction, illegitimate births, male sexual irresponsibility, and female-headed households" (256). Rieder does not mention it, but in essence he makes the point that explanations for the riots such as those offered by the Kerner Commission Report clashed with the worldview of the typical working-class ethnic Democrat. It is also worth noting that Kerner took the media to task for presenting images of Watts and other riots without establishing any real context, which would have lessened the seeming

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absurdity of any sociological explanations. This dynamic was exacerbated by, as Hamill explains it above, the proximity of millions of Northern blue-collar Democrats to black ghettoes. According to Rieder, "When white ethnics of modest means thought about integration of schools and neighborhoods, they did not envision encounters with blacks in general but with the quite specific blacks who lived near them, who seemed morally and physically dangerous" (256). In other words, the dearth of images of working class African Americans in the media worsened white working class racial anxiety, which facilitated their embrace of conservative politics. According to Rieder, such feelings became fodder for conservative Democrats rising on the local level. Politicians such as Mario Procaccino in New York, Sam Yorty in Los Angeles, in Philadelphia, and in Boston "affected a vulgar speaking style that was unembarrassed in its vow to protect white interests" (258). These forces indicated the extent to which Democrats on the local level were trending in a different direction than forces in control of the national party. They also indicate the extent to which liberalism had become electoral poison, and that working people felt it a philosophy with nothing to offer them:

In the popular mind, liberalism acquired a variety of invidious connotations. No longer did it suggest a vision of transcendent justice or the support of vulnerable working people. Liberalism meant taking the side of blacks, no matter what; dismissing middle- class plaints as racism; handcuffing the police; transferring resources and sympathy from a vulnerable middle class to minorities; rationalizing rioting and dependency and other moral afflictions as 'caused' by the environment or as justifiable response to oppression. Liberalism appeared to them as a force inimical to the working and lower-classes, assaulting their communities, their sense of fairness, their livelihood, their children, their physical safety, their values. (258)

Liberalism had, in other words, evolved from a philosophy of working people seeking economic fairness to the bogeyman of socially conservative cultural populism. With liberalism effectively vilified, the New Deal coalition was dead, and the Democratic Party was splintering into irreconcilable factions that clashed spectacularly during the conventions of 1968 and 1972. Rieder describes the 1968 debacle as the last year that old warhorses such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who supported the war and stood for embattled white ethnics, held onto the reigns of the party. Reformers soon thereafter gained enough power to rewrite party rules and add quotas to ensure the participation of blacks, women, and the young. The effects in 1972 were drastic: "Even as the rank-and-file Democrats were moving to the right, party activists and delegates were increasingly liberal. Defrocking the old elites, the liberals radically reduced the influence of white ethnics, Democratic mayors, organized labor, and party leaders in the industrial Northeast" (259). Hodgson describes the televised impact of these changes:

There was Mayor Daley, the working man's friend from Back of the Yards, bounced from the Illinois delegation by eloquent, militant, black Jesse Jackson. There were all the Women, and the Kids, and the Blacks and the Browns, but where were the middle-aged, middle-class, Middle Americans? (426)

Rieder and Hodgson both make astute points about seismic shifts in voting patterns, but neither takes up the question of where, as Scammon and Wattenberg would likely have put it, these non- Real Majority folks, which is to say the young, the poor, the black, the brown, and the female,

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were supposed to go to find representation. Middle America's discomfort with seeing Jesse Jackson on television – in a dashiki, no less! (Perlstein 692) – suggests more about the viewing audience's ingrained problem with race than the Democrats' inability to pander properly to their anxieties. Liberals may have been vilified, but that does not mean that they were not correct about the sociological causes of crime and riots plus the moral correctness of the aims of the Civil Rights Movement. The question lurking behind the words of any analysis of race and the decline of the New Deal coalition is how to address such causes within a political system that rewards conscienceless demagogues. Whatever the answer, the reforms of Democratic party rules resulted in the nomination of George McGovern, who embraced such socially liberal policies as an immediate end to the Vietnam War and amnesty for draft evaders. The South Dakota Senator also supported busing programs, abortion rights, and a guaranteed minimum income while standing against the death penalty. The white working class rallied to Nixon, as did unions such as the Teamsters, the Longshoremen, and Construction Workers. These groups were not only propelled by Nixon's stand on social issues such as the war and college demonstrators, amnesty, and the legalization of marijuana, "Nixon's stimulation of a preelection economic boom also motivated Democrats to leave their party" (Rieder 262). Nixon had apparently learned the lesson of 1970, that is, that he could not win on the Social Issue alone, and Haldeman had apparently succeeded in fulfilling Nixon's demand that the economy "boom" by July 1972. Writing toward the end of the second Clinton Administration, describes in National Review how the then-president had saved his party from the stranglehold of the far-left McGovernites. "Life of His Party" describes how the changes in the nominating process led to McGovern's 1972 nomination and how "it was behind him that the radicals captured the Democratic party in 1972." Explaining the electoral disasters that followed, he notes that Reagan would not have won by such large margins "if Nixon's 'silent majority' in 1972 had not become a new and even more numerous breed now known as Reagan Democrats." Clinton's political instincts being what they were, the former McGovern supporter presented himself as a centrist and won the 1992 election. Podhoretz reads many lessons in Clinton's first two years in office, the two most prominent being that the president was punished by the voters in 1994 for his efforts to enable gays to serve in the military and his attempts to provide health benefits to the uninsured. According to Podhoretz's narrative, Clinton then reasserted his centrist credentials and declared in his 1996 State of the Union address that "The era of big government is over." Such a declaration is indeed a long way from the ambitious scope of his healthcare reform proposal of just over a year before. Podhoretz also notes that Clinton signed a welfare- reform bill and, in what the author reads as another step away from McGovernism, the president "also talked tough on crime, muting standard liberal emphasis on the 'root causes' (poverty, joblessness, racism) that had served as an excuse for violence, especially among minority groups, and stressing in its place the need for more cops." (The quotation marks around the phrase root causes should say it all, but the parenthetical explanation adds another level of understanding to the author's point of view.) And although Podhoretz failed to mention Clinton's disgraceful signing of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, he lauds him for other steps away from McGovern: saying "mend it don't end it" about affirmative action and his consistent deference to the importance of religious faith. In foreign affairs, Podhoretz claims that Clinton took another step away from the far left with his willingness to utilize military force. (A glimpse into Podhoretz's psychosexual perspective on military force arrives earlier, when he argues that Clinton's war in Kosovo "was even less an act of coitus interruptus than the war George Bush

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fought in the Gulf.") Podhoretz's crassness about the impoverished and creepiness about war aside, he offers an interesting take on what Clinton had to do to win the presidency, which is to appeal to the Silent Majority/ slice of the electorate. In short, he had to take conservative stands on various elements of the Social Issue, and he was helped by the lethargic state of the economy in 1992. Looking at Clinton's presidency from a historical perspective sheds light on the extant to which Republicans have been singing the same cultural populism song since at least 1968. Carter was a born-again Christian from the South who, despite Ford's pardon of Nixon, only barely won in 1976. As for 1980, Kevin Phillips, in The Politics of Rich and Poor, cites 's boast that "In the 1980 campaign, we were able to make the establishment, insofar as it is bad, the government. In other words, big government was the enemy, not big business." Atwater continues, stating that the Democratic party had become the party of elites (32). Atwater went on to mastermind the 1988 GOP strategy, whereby he was able to make the son of Greek immigrants (literally) the elitist and the Senator's son (literally) the down-home, at one with the people candidate. The Right continues to embrace this cultural populist, socially conservative, faux anti-elitist approach to elections. To win, they continue to appeal to the socially conservative white middle- and lower-classes by employing the language of populism and tapping into fear and resentments while offering little economically.

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CHAPTER TWO THE EDUCATION OF HARRY ANGSTROM: RABBIT REDUX AND THE CHARGE OF THE KERNER COMMISSION

"But your flag decal won't get you into Heaven anymore." -- John Prine

The Kerner Commission On July 29, 1967, in the midst of a hellacious summer of riots, President Johnson introduced the Commission on Civil Disorders, whose eleven members were charged with the mission of investigating three principle questions concerning the uprisings: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? The commission came to be known as the Kerner Commission, for its Chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. The report was issued February 29 of the following year, the day after "crime and lawlessness" topped the Gallup poll as the most pressing of all of America's concerns. The headline in the New York Times read "PANEL ON CIVIL DISORDERS CALLS FOR DRASTIC ACTION TO AVOID 2-SOCIETY NATION." Underneath that were the words "WHITES CRITICIZED," and below that "Vast Aid to Negroes Urged, With New Taxes if Needed." In essence, the timing of the Gallup Poll and the release of the commission's report combined with the media's framing of its findings to put a high slow pitch into the wheelhouse of every demagogue hoping to hit a home run with the Social Issue. Reporter John Herbers leads with the two-society warning, transitions into "drastic and costly remedies," and then drops the cause-bomb: "the commission said 'white racism' was chiefly to blame for the explosive conditions that sparked riots in American cities during the last few summers." We have to wonder how such lines would be received by whites in places such as Millersburg. What would it be like to read that Kerner's study "amounts to a stinging indictment of the white society for its isolation and neglect of the Negro minority"? For all these years you have envisioned yourself as epitomizing the "reasonable, moral, legal, human way to live—the way people live in Millersburg," when all the while you were packing the powder and lighting the fuse, creating the crime and lawlessness that you feel is destroying your country, your very way of life? Herbers' article reads as if he designed it to stoke white defensiveness and resentment. He cites passages such as "white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II," he highlights sections such as "whites tend to exaggerate how well and quickly they escaped poverty" to underscore the commissioners' rejection of the comparison of ethnicity and race, and he emphasizes portions that call out whites on their ignorance:

"Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans," the commission said. "What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that the white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

Herbers writes that a "remarkable" aspect of the report was that it came from a commission chiefly composed of white, middle-class Americans, many of whom were politicians with

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predominantly white constituencies. He adds that most of the politicians are considered moderate and asserts that the strength of the report, and the breadth of the scope of its recommendations, was due to New York Mayor John Lindsay—the liberal Republican—and others. Two days later, the Times published an article detailing some behind-the-scenes maneuvering that enabled the commission to speak with one voice. Reporter Steven Roberts explains that until just a month before the commission issued its report, some liberal members, including vice chairman Mayor John Lindsay of New York, were contemplating issuing a dissenting statement due to their belief that the report failed to convey the urgency of the situation and proposed inadequate government programs to deal with areas such as education and welfare. Then the liberals won several victories – so many that the conservative faction threatened to issue their own dissent until the moment the report was released. Roberts speculates that the liberals' most important win was the composition and inclusion of a summary of the report. The summary employed starker language than the actual report, and it was designed to focus the attention of the media and the nation on the way in which white society was responsible for the riots and the sacrifices that would be necessary to reverse the deteriorating situation and deepening racial divide. Another controversial event in the writing process that relates to the tone of the final product came in December when the commission faced budget cuts and several of its staff members were dismissed early. According to Roberts, younger staff members claimed their terminations were the result of pressure from the White House, which feared the commission was developing a radical report. While commission spokespeople deny that the administration tried to alter the report, "reliable sources" state aides to the president were unhappy that it failed to compliment their efforts to aid the poor. To top it off, some members of the panel expressed surprise at finding the official report contained a frontispiece that quotes LBJ on the need to "attack...the conditions that breed despair and violence" (ellipsis in the Roberts article). Spokespeople for the commission claim nobody tried to "put anything over on anybody," that everything was done so quickly that members probably did not notice it. Perhaps. But according to Perlstein, President Johnson was "aghast" at the tone and language used in the report. In establishing the foundation for his progressive legislation, LBJ had been careful to appeal to the better angels of the nation. Now here was the Kerner Commission blaming the majority and deriding them as oppressors. And, as Perlstein notes, this majority was preoccupied with their own problems (240). I will explore those problems below, but first I want to examine some of the language of the Kerner Report Summary, which was printed in its entirety in the New York Times. The summary starkly states its conclusion that the United States "is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." It calls on Americans to accept a commitment to "compassionate, massive and sustained" national action, and on the individual level it asks for "new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will." Then there is this kicker: "hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted." The commission seems to justify its call for taxes (and compassion) with what follows, its blunt assertion that white society is not only deeply implicated in the ghetto; it created, maintains, and condones it. Solving the problem is the highest priority of the nation, and nothing else can have a "higher claim on the nation's conscience." It is safe to say that most of the nation did not accept their share of the blame and conjure the will and compassion necessary to undo hundreds of years of racial injustice. Nevertheless, the summary explains the social causes of the riots in detail, and describes some of their symbolic elements.

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The commission explains that Negro rioters acted aggressively against symbols of white authority and property in their neighborhoods, not against white persons. The typical rioter was a teen or young adult, a lifelong resident of the town in which he rioted, and a high school dropout. Despite his educational status, he (the report uses the masculine pronoun) tended to be better educated than his neighbor who did not riot. The rioter was underemployed or worked a menial job. He was full of racial pride and animosity towards both whites and middle-class Negroes. And although he was politically informed, he was skeptical of the political system. There were also "counter-rioters" who walked the streets during the uprisings urging rioters to stop what they were doing. The commission states that these people were typically better educated and made a better living than both the rioters and non-rioters. Although the report does not state this explicitly, it implies that education and income serve as stabilizing factors. While specific points of contention varied from city to city, the commission identified twelve grievances held in common throughout all the riot-torn areas, which it organized into levels of intensity. At the highest level the members listed police practices, the dearth of quality jobs, and poor housing. At the next level were inferior education, inadequate recreation programs and facilities, and the ineffective way in which the political structure handles grievances. Finally, in the third tier of intensity, problems such as disrespectful white attitudes, the discriminatory justice system, inefficient government services on the city and federal level, discriminatory credit practices, and inadequate welfare programs round out the list. The commission concluded that "social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites," and cited education, employment, income, and housing conditions to back up their claims. Worse, since the riots little has been done to alleviate the circumstances that elicited them, and "the principal response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons." The commission also laments the increase in white segregationist and black separatist groups. Taking a broader perspective, the Kerner summary cites "the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans" as the most fundamental cause of the riots. These attitudes are said to be expressed most obviously in employment, education, and housing, which has kept Negroes from progressing economically. Black migration from the South and white flight to the suburbs have created great concentrations of poverty in the major cities of the nation, creating a strain on basic services and exacerbating a crisis of unmet human needs. This has led to crime, drug addition, welfare dependency, and resentment toward society in particular and whites in general. To make matters worse, white society and middle class blacks "have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of human civilization," and this prosperity is flaunted on television before those mired in ghetto poverty. This frustration is heaped onto the thwarted hopes and unfulfilled expectations elicited by the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. Add to that mixture an atmosphere that encourages lawlessness and violence. Examples given here include "white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest" and open defiance by local officials against federal law and court rulings ordering desegregation. Such actions have led to an intensified mistrust of the political structure and the belief that there is no viable alternative to violence as a means of redressing grievances, plus an increased hostility to institutions of law enforcement and the white society that controls them. The commission stresses the extent to which the police have become symbols of "white power, white racism, and white repression." They also acknowledge that many police officers do express such attitudes, and this reinforces the widespread belief among blacks in police brutality

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and the notion of a double standard of justice and protection, one for blacks and another for whites. The Kerner Commission report returns consistently to the issue of employment. It cites the unemployment and "subemployment" rates in the inner cities as the most important factor in Negro poverty, and it discusses the resultant "culture of poverty." The study asserts that under- or unemployed males tend to be unwilling or unable to stay with their families. The strain on children growing up fatherless in an atmosphere of deprivation is exacerbated by mothers forced to find work to support the family. Thus employment problems combine with broken families to create a system of cruel and exploitive relationships in the slums. The report uses the term "'jungle' conditions" to describe the environment of prostitution, drug addiction, and crime. It cites as an example one city's impoverished Negro district having had 35 times the number of "serious crimes against persons" than a high-income white area, and it details other issues such as poor sanitation, shocking infant mortality rates, and exploitation by creditors. Most importantly, the authors stress that children growing up in such an atmosphere are likely to participate in civil disorders. The Kerner Commission addressed head-on the question they hear many Americans asking: "Why have so many Negroes, unlike the European immigrants, been unable to escape from the ghetto and from poverty?" Factors the report cites include the phase of economic development the country was in when Europeans arrived; industry simply needed more unskilled labor than compared to when the Negro migrated north. The "mature" economy had little use for the unskilled labor the Negro had to offer, and he thus found little economic activity in the city. The report also discusses what it calls "the disability of race." While acknowledging that European immigrants suffered from discrimination, the commission argues that these practices were never as pervasive as those against blacks. The immigrants additionally had the advantage of settling in cities with expanding and powerful political machines, which traded economic gains for political backing. This gave the immigrant a voice in the political structure. By contrast, such machines had peaked by the time the Negroes arrived, and were less powerful and increasingly unable to trade jobs and other such favors for political support. Thus blacks had less of an economic foothold and less of a voice than their European counterparts. The commission also compares the family structures of the immigrants and the Negroes. While the former had a strong patriarchal structure and a cohesive extended family that contributed to the total family income, the latter, after the practices of slavery and long stretches of unemployment, had become matriarchal structures and males came to play a secondary role in the family and were poorly compensated for their labor. With labor in mind, the report again stresses that many entrepreneurial opportunities had vanished by the time of the Negro migration. To make matters worse, the practice of segregation denied Negroes good jobs and the chance to leave the ghetto. In a section that must have angered the so-called "ethnics," the Kerner Commission claims that whites often exaggerate the speed and adeptness with which they escaped poverty. The report argues that it has taken immigrants at least three generations to move into the middle class, while Negroes only began concentrating in the cities two generations ago, and under conditions much less favorable than those that faced the immigrants. Obviously, this pervasive attitude in ethnic white communities of "we did it, why can't they?" would do much to undermine the compassion, understanding and new will necessary to lay the foundation for hard choices and new taxes.

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Exacerbating this is the fact that Nixon and the Republicans at this time sensed an opportunity to make a play for the ethnic vote (a vital component of the New Deal coalition) just as black support for GOP presidential candidates was dwindling to next to nothing. Mason notes that while "about a third" of African Americans supported Nixon in 1960, "rather less than ten percent" voted for Goldwater in 1964 (13). The downward trajectory continued in 1968, when Nixon garnered only three percent of the black vote (218). I discuss these trends in Chapter One. The Kerner Summary transitions from its discussion of race and ethnicity back to the impact the media has had on the incendiary situation. It discusses the overall treatment of "the Negro ghettos, community relations, racial attitudes and poverty – day by day and month by month, year in and year out." In addition to its failure to cover the everyday conditions of inner- city life, the report takes news outlets to task for inaccurately portraying the riots themselves, specifically, for exaggerating the scale of "both mood and event." While amplifying the actual disorders, too many outlets failed to report on their causes and consequences. Specifically, these outlets have not conveyed to their predominantly white audiences "a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto." In other words, the Kerner Commission asserts that, to white consumers of the mainstream media, the riots would have seemed to come out of nowhere, without viable cause, and then ended without any discernible consequences to the inhabitants of the these neighborhoods. In short, for the majority of white America, there was no context whatsoever, let alone any kind of socio-economic context, for the disorders, and the publication of the text summary was intended to be a first step toward educating white society about the complex historical factors that led to the riots and the spiking urban crime rates. The text summary concludes by offering visions of three potential ways of dealing with the problems the commission detailed. The first is to continue present policies, which are insufficient to stem the deterioration of inner-city life and would exacerbate the tendency toward two societies: one mostly black and poor cordoned off in the inner city, the other predominately white and affluent located in the suburbs. The second path, also deemed unacceptable, would entail an enrichment of the ghetto without proactive moves toward integration. Since the economy is predominately controlled by the white population, such a policy would also lead to an unequal and divided country. The Kerner Commission strongly recommends the . These policies would include enrichment of the inner cities combined with strong steps taken to facilitate the integration process. The first part of the plan "would involve substantially greater Federal expenditures than anything now contemplated," including a "basic allowance" that would enable families and children to break the cycle of poverty. The commissioners stress that such expenditures would yield great returns in the long run. To stress their point about the cycle of which these latest riots are a part, they cite the testimony of a scholar who argues that the descriptions of the conditions that led to these disorders read like the ones describing the Chicago riot of 1919, the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943, and the Watts riot of 1965. The report reads as an earnest plea to the nation, to white America specifically, to understand the cycle of poverty and the cycle of white repression and black revolt. Beyond the issue of riots, the Commission touched on the relationship between poverty and crime, which provided Nixon an opportunity to pander to his constituency by denouncing this connection as overstated while emphasizing his tough on crime platform. In May of 1968, two months after the Kerner Commission issued their report and in the midst of the primary season, Richard Nixon issued a 6,000-word position paper on crime entitled "Toward Freedom from Fear," an appropriation of one of Roosevelt's most famous turns of

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phrase, which was one of his Four Freedoms. Whereas Roosevelt spoke of war throughout the world, Nixon targeted wavering members of the New Deal coalition by using the term to denote violence within America's own borders. According to Robert Semple of the New York Times, Nixon's paper put forth calls for specific actions that would make the streets safe again and remove (quotations that follow are from the article quoting Nixon) "the stigma of a lawless society" from America. The former vice president charges the current administration with being "lame and ineffectual" in the face of an "88 percent" increase in the crime rate over the previous seven years, and Nixon claims that America is on the verge of allowing the metaphor of the "city jungle" to become "a barbaric reality." The article recounts Nixon's acknowledgment that poverty plays a heavy role in causing crime along with his insistence that its part had been "grossly exaggerated" by the Johnson Administration. Differentiating himself from the liberal position, Nixon argued that doubling the conviction rate "would do more to eliminate crime in the future than a quadrupling of funds of any governmental war on poverty." Nixon also took the Supreme Court to task for its decisions in Escobedo v. Illinois and Miranda v. Arizona. In each case, the Court ruled that confessions were inadmissible as evidence unless the police had explicitly warned suspects of their right to remain silent and to legal counsel. Semple describes Nixon's assertion in the paper that the imbalance in favor of the criminal needs to be corrected, and advocates two proposals aimed at the goal. The first would permit cases of questionable confessions to come to trial and let judges and juries decide their validity. The second would permit limited use of wiretapping in cases of major crime and if probable cause was established. The Johnson Administration, Nixon contends, stands opposed to both measures. Of course newspaper articles have to summarize, for there is simply not enough space for them to print several thousand word papers by each candidate running for office. Reading Nixon's actual piece, though, stands as a reminder of the extent to which summarizing is an act of interpretation. In "Toward Freedom from Fear," Nixon actually states that the proposals he puts forth in his paper deal specifically with crime, adding that "riots are a special problem," and "I have not dealt at all with the urban disorders that have become commonplace in our great cities." This is important because the headline of the Times article states that Nixon decries a "lawless" society, which he does, but the article does not include his caveat that the riots are beyond the scope of his paper. Note from above that when Gallup showed crime and lawlessness topping the list of respondents' domestic concerns, the phrase "crime and lawlessness" includes riots, looting, and juvenile delinquency.4 The headline-grabbing use of the term "lawless," and the Times' failure to include Nixon's qualification, must have resulted in readers getting the impression that Nixon minimized the role of poverty in causing crime and the riots, which seems to have existed meshed together in the American mind as lawlessness. As the article states, Nixon argues in his paper that the administration has been "grossly" exaggerating the role of poverty in causing crime, and he charges them with the "major responsibility for perpetuation of the myth." The use of the word myth is particularly strong, as is his citation of President Johnson's speech from October 1964, when the president declared "The war on poverty which I started—is a war against crime and a war against disorder." We see here that despite his claim that he intends to treat the crime issue as one separate from "urban disorders," Nixon uses Johnson's speech to link in his readers' minds anti-poverty programs, crime, and disorder. Nixon stresses that a war on poverty "is no substitute for a war on crime."

4 See also "Poll Finds Crime Top Fear at Home," New York Times, February 28, 1968, page 29. 96

To Nixon, poverty does not create crime, "crime creates crime." Citing the statistic that only an estimated one out of every eight crimes results in conviction and punishment, Nixon makes his point that too often crime pays, and this success makes it spread. This is the point at which Nixon claims that doubling the conviction rate would do more to eradicate crime than any war against poverty. Nixon wants a new attitude toward crime and the criminal, and wants to eradicate

the socially suicidal tendency – on the part of many public men – to excuse crime and sympathize with criminals because of past grievances the criminal may have against society. By now Americans, I believe, have learned the hard way that a society that is lenient and permissive for criminals is a society that is neither safe nor secure for innocent men and women.

Written as it is in the months following the release of the Kerner Commission report, one cannot help but read the claim that "many public men" tend to "excuse crime and sympathize with criminals because of past grievances" as an attempt on the part of Nixon to throw some kerosene on the fires of controversy ignited by the study. (He also implicitly connects the spike in the crime rate to the rise of permissiveness.) Tapping into the mood of the time, Nixon allows for no extenuating circumstances: "No criminal can justify his crimes on the basis of some real or imagined grievance against his society." In addition to disregarding the sociological content of criminality, Nixon rails against decisions such as Miranda and Escobedo for "ham stringing the peace forces in our society and strengthening the criminal forces." Nixon develops his views on confessions, which the Times conveyed, by arguing that criminals are well aware of legal technicalities and use them to their advantage. "Patently guilty" parties are securing their freedom on such bases: "The barbed wire of legalisms that a majority of one of the Supreme Court has erected to protect a suspect from invasion of his rights has effectively shielded hundreds of criminals from punishment as provided in the prior laws." Nixon claims that if new legislation to close these court-created loopholes fails to satisfy the Court, then perhaps the Constitution should be amended. This is a vague stance Nixon is taking, and one wonders if he is advocating amending any of the amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. Perhaps with this in mind, Nixon puts forth the claim that the crime issue involves "the first civil right of every American, the right to be protected in his home, business and person from domestic violence, and it is being traduced with accelerating frequency in every community in America." This is a phrase the recalls Goldwater's 1964 RNC speech, and it reappears in Nixon's own acceptance speech later in the summer of 1968. Nixon covers a lot of ground in his paper. He argues for the importance of raising the salaries of police officers to ensure that the forces are filled with the highest quality personnel, he emphasizes the necessity of greater police presence in lowering crime rates, and he cites a Harlem Pastor lamenting the dangers his community faces from the criminal element. Such a citation enables Nixon to present himself as advocating a tough stance on crime out of concern for African Americans and the urban poor. Candidate Nixon attempts to strike a balance that allows him to stoke the electorate's fear of crime and feed the backlash against Johnson's Great Society programs and the perceived liberal leanings of the Warren Court without coming across as racist and anti-poor. Nixon, after all, never writes that there is no link between poverty and crime; he states only that it has been grossly exaggerated. With this in mind, he proposes changes

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to the prison system designed to cut down on recidivism. Interestingly, by showing himself to be open-minded about investing money in such reforms, Nixon undercuts his central argument, that the link between poverty and crime is overstated. He cites a study revealing that fifty percent of the prison population has only a grammar school education or less, and he argues for investing money to provide the teachers, parole officers, psychiatrists, and social workers necessary to change the failing prison system "into a system of effective correction and rehabilitation." These proposals made it into the Times article, albeit the last paragraph. Read in the context of red meat phrases such as "the stigma of a lawless society," "city jungle," and "a barbaric reality," though, they hardly seem to be Nixon's main point. The candidate was tapping into a wide-ranging sentiment, a sentiment that the Kerner Commission flew in the face of, that criminals – and rioters and protesters – were being coddled at the expense of hardworking Americans who played by the rules, "the forgotten Americans." Such people, including those in Millersburg, were apt to scoff at notions that their way of life – the reasonable, moral, legal and human way to live – was creating a sick society whose symptoms included crime and riots. And as the documents coming out of the late winter and spring of 1968 suggest, white mainstream America was faced with a choice of whether or not to believe that their vaunted civilization was finally reaping what it had sown: that the crime, riots, and general lawlessness were their chickens coming home to roost, the inevitable result of racism and oppression. In such a case they would have to take responsibility and accept higher taxes and integration. Moreover, the unsettling social upheaval would be seen as necessary change, and the new codes of morality would indeed emphasize how we behave toward each other, not how much of our bodies we happen to display. The other choice would be to decry the connection between crime and poverty as exaggerated, increase the conviction rate and pat oneself on the back for living in the greatest country on earth. In this setup, it seems that Johnson's notion of appealing to people's better angels stands as the middle way, but his Great Society was crumbling in a welter of riots, backlash, and resentment. Most Republicans in 1968 sensed that the way to build a new majority, the way to coax the blue-collar and ethnic voters into their expanding tent, was to stress the Social Issue, especially crime and patriotism. Perlstein describes Governor Ronald Reagan addressing the platform hearings of the Republican National Convention in Miami that summer, stressing that "We must reject the idea that every time the law is broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker" and "It is time to move against these destructive dissidents; it is time to say, 'Obey the rules or get out'" to cheers. Mayor John Lindsay, who was vice chairman of the Kerner Commission and steered its report toward liberal conclusions, argued before the same platform hearings that "The root cause of most crime and civil disorder is the poverty that grips over thirty million of our citizens" to silence (Perlstein 295). Four years later, Lindsay would run for president in the Democratic primaries.

Shillington Boy In his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom, which collects in one volume the four Rabbit novels, John Updike explains the origins of the second novel in the series, Rabbit Redux, by describing the personal impact the turmoil of the 1960s had upon him. The author is careful to note that "the calls for civil rights, racial equality, sexual equality, freer sex, and peace in Vietnam were in themselves commendable and non-threatening" (xiv). However, he speculates that his Lutheran upbringing probably "imbued him" with conservatism, while growing up a Democrat during Roosevelt's reign likely made him inclined "to be unduly patriotic" (xiii-xiv).

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Thus, despite his sympathy with the goal of the war protestors, Updike states that "the rhetoric of social protest and revolt which roiled the Sixties alarmed and, even, disoriented me" (xiv). Specifically, "it was the savagery, between 1965 and 1973, of the domestic attack upon the good faith and common sense of our government, especially of that would-be Roosevelt Lyndon B. Johnson, that astonished me" (xiv). In a particularly interesting turn of phrase for a Harvard- educated writer who lived and worked in New England, Updike writes that he saw these attacks coming from "the intellectual elite and their draft vulnerable children" (xiv). The author's use of the term "intellectual elite," a term used by conservative political strategists to vilify the Left, suggests the extent to which his religiously-rooted conservatism and staunch patriotism survived into and beyond the Sixties and came to stand in contrast to, and in conflict with, the Northeastern liberal points of view that Updike absorbed during his years at Harvard. I argue in this chapter that Updike attempts to work through this conflict in Rabbit Redux by situating it in his protagonist Harry Angstrom. Updike describes Harry almost as an alter-ego, an expedient creation that gives voice to the part of him rooted in the socially-conservative, God and country, small-town Pennsylvania milieu of his youth. Despite his own education and Harry's lack of one, Updike insisted in an interview with Michael Sragow that "intellectually, I'm not essentially advanced over Harry Angstrom. I went to Harvard, it's true, and wasn't much good at basketball…other than that we're rather similar" (60). Harry is clearly not an aspect of Updike's past that he looked down upon and wished to exorcise through his writing. Indeed, in the collected interview section of Picked-Up Pieces, Updike claims that "Like Harry, I'm hog fat, reactionary, passive. I'm a plugger. Even the way Rabbit sits in front of his Linotype machine day after day reminded me of myself, of the way I sit in front of the typewriter" (510). Harry's linotyper stems from his creator's formative years in Shillington, Pennsylvania where, as Updike describes it in his introduction to Harry Angstrom,

For three summers I had worked as a copy boy in a small-city newspaper and had admired the men in green eyeshades as they perched at their square-keyed keyboards and called down a rain of brass matrices to become hot lead slugs, to become columns of type. It was the blue-collar equivalent of my sedentary, word-productive profession. (xv)

Still, despite his comfort with that side of his personality, Updike acknowledges experiencing internal discord during the time he wrote Rabbit Redux. In an interview with Charlie Reilly, Updike said that during the 1960s, "I felt conflicted, as they say, and rather more conservative than most of my literary friends, which was really my problem. The Shillington boy in me was at war with the Harvard graduate and the eastern liberal, I suppose" (224). Rabbit Redux, specifically the psyche of Harry Angstrom, captures this internal conflict. Updike designed Harry to "serve as a receptacle for my disquiet and resentments, which would sit more becomingly on him than on me" (Introduction, xv). As an artist, however, Updike was not content merely to vent his acrimony through his main character; instead, he created a scenario that forced Harry to endure challenges to his most coveted beliefs and intractable prejudices. I read Rabbit Redux as Updike utilizing Harry's mind to set up a between reactionary impulses and an open- minded willingness to consider strange new perspectives, a clash that the author recognized not only in his own mind, but in the mind of white Middle America as a whole. Updike's depiction of his experience with national electoral politics also reflects that of much of Middle America of the late 1960s in that it articulates class-based tensions that were

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undermining the New Deal coalition. While racial issues and evolving social mores riled many socially conservative Democrats, Updike, in his memoir Self-Consciousness, stresses his affinity for, and modest participation in, the Civil Rights movement, and he fondly recounts being "happy enough to lick the sugar of the ," meaning that he indulged in such lighter spoils of permissiveness as marijuana and (120-24). The issue of the Vietnam War, however, illuminated the class-based divide between his Harvard allies and himself. In the chapter tellingly entitled "On Not Being a Dove," Updike recalls that during his New Deal childhood, "the Republican party was understood to be that of the rich," while "the Democratic party was that of the common man" (118). He describes his political inclinations as working well for him when he went to Harvard, for his party affiliation "fit nicely into the liberal strain of the establishment and undergraduate thinking" (118). Updike states that as a student in the 1950s he scarcely noticed the class differences that would become obvious during the era of the Vietnam protests: "They, secure in the upper-middle class, were Democrats out of human sympathy and humanitarian largesse, because this was the party that helped the poor. Our family had simply been poor, and voted Democrat out of crude self-interest" (119). Here Updike sets the stage for a conflict between what he sees as an aristocratic liberalism and a more egalitarian, or democratic, version. He insinuates that the Northeastern liberal elite were content to interact with the poor from their pedestal, but they could not accept in a position of power a Texan who had grown up in genuine rural poverty, Lyndon Johnson, and others from outside of their small, privileged circle. From Updike's point of view, the war protests were as much about this arrogant personal enmity than reasoned policy disagreements:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar- strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. […] They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the U.S.A. and its many amenities—intact. (120)

Although Updike makes a point of stating that he voted for McGovern in 1972 (146), this passage indicates the extent to which Agnew's rhetoric was geared toward courting an important block of New Deal Democrats, the Middle Americans who hailed from the Shillingtons all across the country, who felt estranged from their party's powerful Northeastern liberal wing. Updike conjures all the classic Agnew images, including direct references to snobbery (while only implying the impudence), the Eastern establishment, Manhattanites, plus allusions to Harvard professors, hippie kids, and the disdain of all of the above for law and order and the practical realities of international politics. And if such resentment-steeped rhetoric reflected the point of view of John Updike, who enjoyed his status as part of the Ivy League literati, embraced the Civil Rights movement, smoked pot, and even donned dashikis and love beads (120), one has to wonder how deeply it resonated with Middle Americans who were a lot more Shillington than Harvard. Updike states that his steadfast "undovishness," a term that suggests his view of Vietnam must have been complicated enough to avoid the full-fledged "hawk" moniker, kept him connected to his roots:

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My undovishness, like my battered and vestigial but unsurrendered Christianity, constituted a refusal to give up, to deny and disown, my deepest and most fruitful self, my Shillington self—dimes for war stamps, nickels for the Sunday-school collection, and grown-ups maintaining order so that I might be free to play with my cartoons and Big Little Books. (141)

The series of images that close out the passage, the nation united behind the good war, religious values, sound currency, and a profound trust in people over thirty, suggest the extent to which the peace movement represented a break for Updike and others like him. Their notion of America was being destroyed by the protesters, "a privileged few" who, "under the banner of a peace movement," waged war "upon the administration and the American majority that had elected it" (131). His reference to the American majority underscores the conservative populism inherent in his "undovishness," as does his lamentation that the belief in America's inherent goodness was under attack: "I […] thought it sad that our patriotic myth of invincible virtue was crashing, and shocking that so many Americans were gleeful at the crash" (124). He describes resenting his "native land, with its treasure of natural resources and enlightened institutions and hopeful immigrant peoples, being described as Amerika" (140). Small wonder, then, that when the subject of the war would come up, he describes how "my face would become hot, my voice high and tense and wildly stuttery; I could feel my heart race in a kind of panic whenever the subject came up, and my excitement threaten to suffocate me" (124). Updike's reference to his racing heart and threat of suffocation indicates that the very core of his being, his "deepest and most fruitful self," his "Shillington self," was threatened with annihilation as the America of his childhood succumbed to attacks from elitist protesters. This was not merely a matter of patriotism for Updike; it was an existential crisis. The protesters were destroying both the American Dream and the boy who dreamed it. Harry Angstrom has a very similar physical reaction when debating the merits of the Vietnam War in Rabbit Redux, and Updike also ties Harry's notion of America's invincible virtue to his character's very existence. This is the disquiet the author mentions above when he states that Harry serves "as a receptacle for my disquiet and resentments." And despite Updike's claim, cited above, that he found the calls for racial and sexual equality commendable and non-threatening, he admitted to Charlie Reilly that during the late 1960s "a lot of Americans at the time, probably myself included, must have felt rather invaded, almost pushed out of sight" (134). In Self-Consciousness, a decade after that interview, Updike describes the upheaval of the time making him feel, rather than nearly-invisible, conspicuous and incriminated:

My earliest sociological thought about myself had been that I was fortunate to be a boy and an American. Now the world was being told that American males—especially white, Protestant males who had done well under "the system"—were the root of . Law- abiding conformity had become the opposite of a refuge. (145-46)

Sally Robinson opens her essay on Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich with this very quotation from Updike's memoirs, and she focuses on the notion of white invisibility as an important aspect of systemic racism. I argue below that white obliviousness to such systemic racism is an important theme in, as Updike calls them, the "teach-in" scenes of the third chapter of Redux ("Introduction" xvi). Robinson's title, "'Unyoung, Unpoor, Unblack': John Updike and the

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Construction of Middle American Masculinity," refers directly to Scammon and Wattenberg's The Real Majority, one of the books she reads in her interrogation of the construct "Middle American." She argues that in Rabbit Redux, Updike subjects his protagonist – who is, as she puts it, "our representative Middle American" – "to a number of forces which, together, work to diminish the power 'naturally' afforded to white masculinity in American culture." She adds that Harry finds himself immersed in a confusing muddle of racial, sexual, and national politics "that threatens his construction of 'America' and his privileged place within it" (343). Robinson asserts that "the primary impulse" of the novel "is to resituate white masculinity, conceived of as 'Middle Americanness,' in a landscape radically altered during the course of a turbulent decade" (342), and she focuses on political power and its paradoxical relationship to both visibility and invisibility. Robinson argues that Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich document the decline of white heterosexual masculinity from its status as "the self-evident (and invisible) standard against which all identities are measured and found to be 'different'" (333). As the idea of "different" suggests, this invisibility stemmed from white heterosexual masculinity's position of normativity. Thus, invisibility in this case was an indication of dominance, and Rabbit Redux arrived at a time when white, heterosexual, males were becoming visible, falling, as Robinson phrases it, "into specificity" (333). In short, the group was losing its "power to represent America per se, and to determine the terms of American normativity" (332). She contends that the emergence of the "Middle American" into the national discourse after Nixon's election made the category lose its normative status and turned it into "a beleaguered and disenfranchised group whose rights have been trampled upon in the rush to embrace the gender, racial, and sexual 'underdogs' whose demands have 'silenced' the majority" (333). This is the "rediscovered" Middle American that I describe at length above, which Robinson insists should be read as a construct that is white and male with a nebulous class position that blurs the working and middle classes. Robinson points out that discourses concerning the so-called silent majority – a term she equates with Middle America – made heterosexual white masculinity into a visibly specific category of identity in America, and set in motion "an emergent identity politics of the dominant," which she traces all the way through to the so-called Republican "revolution" of 1994 (333). According to Robinson's reading of the late Twentieth Century American electoral scene, Middle America took center stage at the precise instant their decentering was touted, and this disempowerment made Middle American men visible and infused them with a group consciousness that facilitated their re- empowerment via techniques similar to those used by the liberation movements that challenged white masculine dominance in the first place (333-34). Hence the paradox of power and visibility: their loss of power at the hands of organized groups made Middle America visible, which infused it with a group consciousness that enabled it to empower itself via a different technique, a technique based on the model of identity politics. I want to emphasize two points about Robinson's analysis. First, she stresses throughout her article that she is discussing the construction, or imagining, of Middle America rather than actual Americans in the mid-income range. Second, the blurring of class distinctions within this idea of Middle America serves to exacerbate tensions between white and black Americans. It is this second point that I will now explore in some detail. Robinson states that books from the Sixties and Seventies, such as Richard Lemon's The Troubled American, Donald I. Warren's The Radical Center, and Scammon and Wattenberg's The Real Majority, describe in a slippery and imprecise way the "middle" that makes up "Middle America." These books function as part of a discourse "that subtly collapses class, gender, and

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sexual tensions and differences among whites into a polarized debate about race," which ultimately "enables the disappearance of differences between or among white Americans and works against the creation of alliances across race" (336). In other words, Robinson interprets the discourse that created "Middle America" as emphasizing racial tensions instead of recognizing "a white ruling class that might be held responsible for the economic and social woes of the working and middle classes" (336). According to Robinson, this discourse facilitates a "new 'popular wisdom' [that] enables the erasure of the conservative white elite, as well as the scapegoating of people of color and others who benefit from the Great Society programs of the 1960s" (337). Race can thus be used as a wedge issue that divides the working/middle class along racial lines so that the white ruling caste can continue to reign without serious challenge from below. An examination of the works she describes clearly indicates the astuteness of Robinson's scrutiny of the construction of "Middle America." Warren, for example, cites analyses that suggest that Middle America may include aspects of the white collar workforce as well as blue collar workers, he discusses the role of ethnicity and education level in determining the identity of the Middle American (10-12), but he never veers from the assumption that Middle America is white. As for Lemon's work, its origin speaks volumes. The Troubled American is an expansion of the Newsweek special edition entitled "The Troubled American: A Special Report on the White Majority," which I discuss at length in my first chapter. Robinson points out that the book originated with a Gallup poll of a cross-section of white America. She also notes that although Lemon does initially qualify the sample as "white," "Middle American" quickly becomes raceless, meaning that in The Troubled American "Middle America" is coded as white. Furthermore, Robinson calls attention to how Lemon emphasizes white racial resentment (338), a point I also make above about the Newsweek report. Although The Real Majority presents more of an analytical challenge, one cannot overlook that the authors state unequivocally that "The great majority of the voters in America are unyoung, unpoor, and unblack; they are middle-aged, middle-class, middle-minded" (21). Taken in isolation, the quotation seems to suggest that the authors are poised to strike the same tone as Lemon. In the greater context of The Real Majority, though, the notion of this "unblack" majority reads as a mere statement of fact: the majority of the American populace of the time was in fact white. Scammon and Wattenberg were political strategists, not critical theorists, and their objective was to help Democrats craft a message that avoided both extremes (Left and Right) and that appealed to the widest middle swath of the electorate. At one point when the authors refer to Middle Americans, such as on page 225, they do so to criticize the media for its stereotypical portrayals of their lives (, beer, and factories) and for sensationalizing their alienation and anger (racism, guns, law and order, revolting against taxes, and being burgeoning white revolutionaries against sexual education and for traditional values). In this context, Scammon and Wattenberg argue that in addition to being unyoung, unpoor, and unblack, most voters are "unpolitical" (225). They contend that the press needs a story, and because

most Americans are most deeply and immediately concerned about themselves and their families and about nonpolitical concerns that so much of the talk about the seething white majority, the seething black minority, the rebellion of this, the counterrebellion of that, is totally out of perspective. (226)

Scammon and Wattenberg, despite the rhetorically unfortunate terminology that is "unblack,"

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make it a point to insist that African-Americans are part of the so-called "Real Majority," a contention that may initially seem progressive but actually bolsters Robinson's main claim. Robinson reads Scammon and Wattenberg, despite their possessing "some awareness about 'racial coding,'" as "unwittingly" evincing "a growing obsession with race that defines whiteness in the period." She sees the racial binary as skewed because "white" is established as the normative (and "beleaguered") category while "black" stands as the racialized one "coded by 'welfare,' 'law and order,' 'urban decay,' and 'crime'" (338). She also revisits Updike's "law- abiding conformity" quotation that opens her article, stating that such lawful conformity is the normativity behind which whiteness hides (338). Writing as Democratic operatives, the authors would likely respond to Robinson's charges by describing her work as the kind of "incredible ideological verbiage on the part of liberals" that results in the assertion that law and order "is a code word for racism" (168). Scammon and Wattenberg stress that liberal Democrats must attempt to separate race from the Social Issue, and they clearly assert that the connection between race and crime is "inherently a phony linkup" (285). In addition to, as I describe above, pointing out the Harlem branch of the NAACP's tough on crime platform that advocated harsh minimum sentences for perpetrators of street crime (234), the authors assert that "Blacks are a part of white Middle America" (240, emphasis in original). They qualify this assertion by stating "not totally, not everywhere, not everyone, not on every issue, but enough so as to be psephologically5 significant." The authors contend that blacks have attained this white Middle American status – Robinson would likely say "normative status" – as they have slowly clawed their way into the middle class:

As a matter of fact, based on the old principle that no one is more middle class than the new middle class, some feel there is probably no community in America that is more bourgeois, more addicted to those "middle-class values," than the growing number of blacks now reaching middle-income status. Black voters, like all other groups of voters, have not shown any delight at campus disruptions, or hippies on drugs, or crime in the streets, or pornography on the newsstand. (240)

The implication here is obvious but worth explaining. Scammon and Wattenberg state explicitly that Middle America is white, and they conflate Middle America with the middle class, whose bourgeois values are therefore plainly coded as "white." As African Americans succeed at acquiring jobs with salaries in the middle-income range, they, according to the authors, by and large show disdain for the . Scammon and Wattenberg insinuate that until they attain such middle-class occupations and disappear into white Middle America, African Americans will not have embraced these white values and political positions and will remain visibly "black." It is worth noting at this point that Pete Hamill's "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class," the article that – at least in the press – arguably kicked off the "rediscovery" of the white working class, does not contain the term "Middle American" or any variation of it. Hamill's work can be read, in other words, as standing apart from the discourse that created "Middle America." As I mentioned earlier, Hamill prefers the term "white working class" to the "ice cold" and sociological "white lower middle class." With that in mind, he distinguishes between the working

5 The authors explain on page 16 that "The word is defined as 'the study of elections,' and it derives from the Greek word psephos which means 'pebble.' The derivation comes from the custom of ancient Greece for citizens to vote by dropping colored pebbles into the Greek equivalent of our ballot box." 104

and middle classes, describing the latter as "that cadre of professionals, semi-professionals and businessmen" who have college degrees; the working class, by contrast, "earns its living with its hands or its backs." Hamill notes that the working class stands on the socioeconomic spectrum between the middle class and the poor, the latter of whom he describes in nonracial terms: "the aged, the sick and those unemployable women and children who live on welfare." Most significantly, Hamill also points out the existence of a solid black working class while lamenting how televised stereotypes of blacks have made "any sort" of an alliance between the white and black working class nearly impossible. Hamill refuses to conflate the working and middle classes under a catchall term such as "Middle America" and he calls for a working class alliance across race, a coalition that would eschew race in favor of class and ultimately prevent, as Robinson puts it above, "the erasure of the conservative white elite." Updike flirts with a version of such an alliance in one instance of Rabbit Redux, but he fails to pursue it in any meaningful way. The novel also contains a scene, when Harry gets fired, that hints at racial tensions that could potentially undermine it. Harry's termination actually results from technological advances that have rendered him obsolete; scientific progress, then, functions in the novel as another revolutionary force that, along with the social upheaval of the era, displaces him. Rabbit Redux is set during the time when media attention shifted, as an article on the 1969 New York mayoral race put it, from "upper-class discontent on the campuses" and "black rumblings in the ghetto" to the "rediscovered" white working class (Harwood A1, A6). Updike states in his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom that the Redux incarnation of his protagonist would be as "one of those middle Americans feeling overwhelmed and put upon by all the revolutions in the air" (xv). Based on the autobiographical elements, which I have detailed in the preceding pages, that the author drew upon to recreate Harry, we can safely read Updike's use of "middle American" to mean white, working class male. In an interview with Melvyn Bragg, the author indicates that Harry's "middleness" results from his being sandwiched specifically between black militants and the white hippies, adding that "There was a peculiar attraction developing between the privileged classes and the black underclass" (224). Harry Angstrom worries over this combination and their incendiary rhetoric: "they're the ones, the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to pull it all down" (Redux 41). I read much of Rabbit Redux as Updike's using Harry Angstrom to come to terms with the worldview, rhetoric, and tone of this new coalition that had displaced white workers as it rose to prominence within the Left. Through Harry, Updike voices his own resentments and deals with the challenges to his conception of America, described above as the attacks on the "patriotic myth of invincible virtue" (Self-Consciousness 124). Although it is not mentioned by name in Rabbit Redux, Updike was clearly influenced by the Kerner Commission report, which he used as a starting point to explore the racial components of this deteriorating myth of white America and to attempt to work through his culpability as a white male who had done well under the system. No criticism takes into account the Kerner Commission's influence on Rabbit Redux. I contend that readings of the so-called "teach-in" scenes, and the novel as a whole, will be enriched by considering this aspect of the novel's rich historical context. The set-up for these scenes echo the wording of specific parts of the report and the way that Harry's initial resistance to what he learns reflects the counterarguments that the commission members anticipated. This resistance reflects Updike's own internal conflict between the Shillington boy and the Harvard- educated eastern liberal within his psyche. By dramatizing this struggle, I argue that Updike takes seriously the charge of the Kerner Commission to create new attitudes and a new understanding about the history of race in America, and I make the case that Updike models for

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his readers what the education of a skeptical white Middle American male, who believes steadfastly in the infallibility of his country, could look like. I conclude by explaining how, despite Updike's seemingly noble intentions, he ultimately presents unflattering caricatures of the Left and indulges in a sexualized racism that combine to reinforce deep-rooted stereotypes that ultimately facilitate the exodus of such Middle Americans away from Liberalism and into the new Conservative Majority.

Characterizing the Evolving Landscape of American Politics Many of the characters of Rabbit Redux represent various components of the evolving landscape of American politics. Critic Joyce Markle comments that Updike gives "his major characters the appearance of microcosms of the United States as a whole" (147), and Dilvo I. Ristoff remarks on the series' "synecdochic mode" before specifically stating that each of the prominent characters in Redux "stand for a different color of the ideological spectrum" (8, 23). The literature on Updike's work indicates some controversy about whether or not the author succeeded in his portrayals. Eugene Lyons argues that Rabbit Redux fails because of Updike's inability to draw any "fully human" characters (47), while George W. Hunt suggests that within its pages "typology has replaced character" (171). Suzanne Henning Uphaus contends, by contrast, that "the major characters become representative without losing their credibility as individuals" (80). Marshall Boswell agrees with this perspective, declaring that Updike "endows all of his characters" with "depth and complexity" (Tetralogy 99). It is no surprise that Updike's characterization of the so-called black militant, Skeeter, has generated the most friction, or that his depiction of the white upper middle class hippie, Jill, has provoked antagonism as well. Updike, for his part, freely admitted to interviewer Jeff Campbell that "the book is a touch fantastic," and insinuates that when it came to Skeeter and Jill, he was intentionally drawing with broad strokes, explaining that their arrival in Harry's house represents the "way in which the television set invades the guy's life. That is, these are sort of headline figures who come upon him" ("Interview" 90). A few years later, Updike would make a similar point when responding to Hunt's criticism of these specific depictions, stating in a personal letter to the critic that "This was an era when we lived by television, and those two just came in off the set into Rabbit's lap" (Hunt 171). I will discuss these particular characterizations, and critical reactions to them, in greater detail below. For now, I want to stress that each of Updike's comments strongly indicate that his point was not to draw these countercultural figures with precision and depth. His goal was to create a scenario in which he could dramatize the interaction between his typical white Middle American, Harry Angstrom, and these revolutionary forces known to Harry only through newspapers and television news. Updike's depictions of Skeeter and Jill are thus as mere images, intentionally flat and without complexity. The author's goal was not to interrogate these media constructions in order to unveil their underlying human intricacies; he only wanted to illustrate the impact of their mediated rhetoric on Harry's, and thus Middle America's, concept of infallible America. Although Harry does come to a somewhat more complex understanding of his country and its history by novel's end, Updike, by uncritically perpetuating broad media-constructed caricatures of these blocs of the Left, reinforces ugly stereotypes and ultimately facilitates the rightward swing of the white working class. In contrast to the cartoonish militant and hippie, Updike draws the white working class with the detailed precision of a man who grew up around them. Although he does not rely on televised images for their depictions, Updike does seem to have been influenced by, in addition to his own angst, articles about their so-called rediscovery, which occurred during the year the 106

novel is set. Rabbit Redux begins on July 16, 1969, hours after the liftoff of Apollo 11. The author reintroduces Harry Angstrom, the former high school basketball star, as a man slouching toward middle-age in "the stagnant city of Brewer," a fictional mid-sized town in eastern Pennsylvania that Updike slyly suggests, via a headline in a local paper, is quintessentially Middle American (3, 157). Harry himself seems to be, too. As Robinson puts it above, Harry is "our representative Middle American" (343), and Ristoff argues that his story "becomes a story of middle America" (8). Harry's interpretively rich surname also points to his anxious Middle American status. Updike told an interviewer that the name is meant to suggest the fear his protagonist feels: "'Angstrom'—he is a man of angst, and he is afraid" (Bragg 224). Campbell adds to this idea, pointing out that "an angstrom is actually a unit of length equal to one hundred millionth of a centimeter, used primarily to specify radiation wavelengths" ("Middling, Hidden, Troubled America" 35). The emphasis here, obviously, is that Harry is one of the little people, one of the forgotten Americans. Campbell adds that in the 1950s, angst became a catchall term for the existential anxiety and despair intellectuals felt about the absurdity of human existence. He concludes that Harry becomes "Updike's angst-ridden American Everyman" (35). Robert Alter uses the term anguish, proposing that if Harry's German ancestry qualifies him as an ethnic, "one might contend that this is the first notable novel about the much-discussed anguish of the neglected ethnic amid the upheavals of the Vietnam years, the revolutions of the young and the black" (47). Harry's angst is therefore different from that of the 1950s in that, as Robinson describes the novel, he is trying to "resituate" his and Middle America's place within the rapidly evolving political landscape rather than reassessing humanity's place in the cosmos. This is an essentially similar quest, but on a national rather than cosmological scale. However, as I will illustrate below, Harry's patriotism has to it a solid religious basis, and as I indicated in the introduction, Harry's concept of America is inextricably linked to his existential well-being. Harry's father, Earl, also exudes devotional patriotism. Earl is in his mid-sixties, and was therefore in his late twenties when FDR took office. His job at the printing plant, where he works with Harry, places him squarely within the blue-collar stratum, as does his choice of beer, Schlitz (4). Earl's political outlook reflects that of Scammon and Wattenberg's "real majority," the moderate political center that trends liberal on economic issues and conservative on social issues. Earl indeed feels protective of his social programs and social values, and he represents the foundation of the waning New Deal Coalition. When Harry asks him how they can afford the fifty dollars a day it would take to place his mother in a nursing home, adding that such an expense would "suck us right down the drain," Earl's reply indicates the religiosity with which he views the social safety net:

Harry, God in His way hasn't been all bad to your mother and me. Believe it or not there's some advantages to living so long in this day and age. This Sunday she's going to be sixty-five and come under Medicare. I've been paying in since '66, it's like a ton of anxiety rolled off my chest. There's no medical expense can break us now. They called LBJ every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. […] it's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man. (9)

Harry sees his father as one of the "little men" standing on the sidewalk in the intense July sun,

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"squinting in the manna of blessings that come down from the government" (10). Earl Angstrom, who looks upon government programs such as Medicare as a blessing, would surely have been repulsed by Goldwater's attacks on the basic liberal tenet that government should intervene in the capitalist system and provide a safety net. Harry's father saw himself as "the little man," a variation of the "forgotten American" lauded by Roosevelt, Goldwater, and Nixon. But despite the latter's efforts to strip the term of its economic connotation and apply it to the social upheaval of the 1960s, Earl would have used the term "forgotten American" as a man of the New Deal would, in its strictest economic sense. The fact that no medical expense could break him and his family relieves him of anxiety; the government has alleviated this little man's angst, has provided Mr. Angstrom with salvation. In his worldview, the laissez faire capitalists, rather than government bureaucrats, represent his principle adversaries. Late in the novel, he states unequivocally that "the industrialists" and "the monster fortunes" are the ones "we should put in jail" (322). Earl's old-style economic populism stops way short of radicalism, though. When his father discusses jailing the monstrous industrialists, Harry teases him about becoming a radical. Earl replies that he is not a radical, for "you got to be rich to be radical" (322). When considered in the context of an earlier scene, when he denigrates "rich-kid revolutionaries" (143), this line suggests the extent to which Earl's social conservatism coexists with his . He loathes campus radicals, and he epitomizes the type of voter Vice President Spiro Agnew and his speechwriters targeted with such rhetorical devices as "radiclib," a term designed to insinuate that the economic liberalism Earl lauds as a blessing has morphed into a dangerous, unpatriotic- bordering-on-treasonous campaign to undermine the social fabric of the nation. Via Earl Angstrom's simultaneous hatred of wealthy industrialists and collegiate radicals, Updike identifies a turning point in the history of the word elite. The term for Earl is rooted in wealth in both contexts, but when applied to rich radicals it denotes the Social Issue and suggests Middle America's new , the war against cultural elites launched by Nixon and Agnew. Moratorium Day actually provides Nixon and Earl with some common ground. Riding past a church where protestors are carrying signs and candles, Earl states that "I don't have much use for Tricky Dick and never have, but the poor devil, he's trying to do the decent thing over there, get us out so the roof doesn't fall in until after we leave […]." He also criticizes the demonstrations because "all they do is convince the little yellow Reds over there they're winning." When Harry, who after his nights with Jill and Skeeter can appreciate multiple perspectives on such issues, suggests that the protestors only want the killing to stop, Earl asserts that "killing's not the worst thing around. Rather shake the hand of a killer than a traitor" (303- 04). Earl's inflexible patriotism in the face of such demonstrations makes him the literal embodiment of the type of socially conservative Democrat the Nixon administration sought to appeal to via speeches delivered by Agnew, whose rise to prominence within the administration was based on his criticism of the media's handling of the Moratorium, and Nixon's own response to it, his Silent Majority speech. Although one doubts if he could ever vote Republican, the Social Issue, especially campus radicals, patriotism, crime, and as we will see, race, could surely weaken the ties between Middle Americans such as Earl Angstrom and a Democratic Party seen as veering radically leftward. Updike argues via Earl's dialogue that much of Middle America, perhaps older Middle America, racializes the crime issue. Indeed, despite Scammon and Wattenberg's insistence that race and crime is a phony linkup, in the mind of Earl Angstrom they are inextricably bound. When Harry mentions the county's violent crime rate spiking, Earl forcefully asserts, hitting each

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word for emphasis, that "It's these God, damn, blacks, is what it is" (142). From there, Earl launches into a racist diatribe about how only a few blacks can do a white man's job, "so they have to rob and kill, the ones that can't be pimps and prizefighters." He also believes that "this country should have […] shipped 'em all back to Africa when we had a chance," claims that Africa would no longer take American blacks because they have been spoiled by "booze and Cadillacs and white pussy," and concludes by arguing that "they're the garbage of the world, Harry. American Negroes are the lowest of the low. They steal and then they have the nerve to say the country owes it to 'em." Earl's rant is ugly but not, unfortunately, far-fetched. The passage, in addition to making a point about the conflation of race and crime in the mind of much of Middle America, indicates the inherent tensions in national party politics, which relies for success on uneasy coalitions. Earl, staunch Democrat and ardent LBJ man, most certainly would have voted the previous year for his Johnson's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, the man who twenty years before prodded his party to abandon its states' rights perspective and embrace African-Americans' struggle for equality. It is along such ideological fault lines that the conservative movement saw opportunities. Earl Angstrom animates Kevin Phillips and Jonathan Rieder's statistics indicating the impact on the New Deal coalition of the Democratic National Party's embrace of the Civil Rights Movement. While the senior Angstrom certainly never indicates that he will veer from his loyalty to the Democrats, his tirade suggests his party's susceptibility to race serving their opponents as a wedge issue. However, such a strategy's success would require conservatives to make some semblance of peace with the government playing a role in the economy and the social programs that form the foundation of the social safety net. And although Updike never mentions George Wallace in the novel, Earl's racial animosities combined with his lifelong distrust of Republicans, stemming from their disregard for the little man, attests to the Alabaman's electoral strength among northern blue-collar workers in 1964 and 1968. Wallace was steadfastly conservative on issues of race, crime, and patriotism, while economically embodying, as Phillips describes him in The Emerging Republican Majority, the "free-spending populist" (166). Updike presents Fred Springer, Harry's father-in-law and owner of a local Toyota franchise, as yet another aspect of the American political spectrum. Harry and Springer meet up the morning after Harry's wife, Janice, confirmed to him that she is having an affair, a revelation that occurs a few hours before Ted Kennedy's plunge off a bridge in Chappaquiddick. Ristoff insightfully states that Updike has a fervent Republican react to the Kennedy scandal in order to counterbalance Earl's attack on the Republican Party (84-85). I disagree, however, with his contention that Springer, Earl, and Harry occupy the right side of the "ideological spectrum" (98- 99). The three men are indeed socially conservative, but Harry voted for Humphrey (Redux 280), which suggests that like his father, he is liberal on economic issues and still part of what remains of the New Deal coalition. Springer is emphatically conservative on economic issues and openly reviles the New Deal. Also, with his attitude toward Democrats in general and such exposition as "he tried ten years ago to turn Rabbit into a car salesman but in the end Harry opted to follow his own father into honest work" (17), Updike shows Springer to be Earl's antithesis. Springer uses the Chappaquiddick accident as a launching pad to rail against Democratic corruption. So certain is he that this corruption will keep the Massachusetts senator out of jail, Springer declares America "a police state run by the Kennedys" (69-70). Despite this display of contempt, Springer tells Harry that the Kennedys "don't get my dander up like FDR." In a statement that serves as a stark contrast to Earl's "little man" homily, Springer credits the Kennedys for not trying "to turn the economy upside down for the benefit of the poor, they were

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willing to ride along with the System as it's been handed down." Having worked himself into a lather, Springer continues by offering his view of the Democrats and their efforts on behalf of the downtrodden:

[FDR] tried to turn it upside down for the benefit of the black and white trash, and when that didn't work for eight years he finagled the little Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor so he had a war to bail him out of the Depression. That's why you have these wars, believe it or not, to bail the Democrats out of their crazy economics.

He adds that LBJ, "an FDR man," went into Vietnam "just to get the coloreds up into the economy," and as he trails off, he states that Truman did "the same thing in Korea" (70). Clearly, from Fred Springer's perspective, in place of Earl Angstrom's conception of the "little man" – an image Earl Angstrom indicates is a white, working-class reflection of himself – there exists only the black and white trash, people unworthy of the effort it would take to change the system that benefits white businessmen such as himself. In terms of traditional American class politics, Fred Springer the business owner and Earl Angstrom the blue-collar worker would find themselves perpetually at odds. However, the rise of the Social Issue, especially law and order, suggests that the two men share common ground, the common ground of social conservatism that Republican strategists hoped would enable them to build a new majority based on an alliance of white- and blue-collar workers. Springer and Earl never interact in person during the novel; they convey their beliefs separately to Harry, their point of connection. During these conversations, both men view the problem of crime through racial lenses, and Springer specifically uses the term "law and order" when discussing the riots that flared up in York, Pennsylvania the week of the moon landing and Chappaquiddick. According to the York Daily Record, which has on its website a timeline of the unrest, on July 17 a young black motorist was shot by an unseen assailant when he and his friends were pulled over by police for violating curfew. White and black gangs began clashing that afternoon, and before long six blocks of the city were besieged by people throwing rocks and shooting. The next night a police officer was shot while riding in an armored car, and he died a couple of weeks later. On July 19-20, two black children, aged 2 and 8, were included among the twenty-seven hurt over the weekend. The police accused black citizens of using children to prevent them from shooting back, while black residents countered that white gangs shot the children while the police watched. On July 21, another black motorist and another police officer were shot, the motorist fatally. Fires consumed an entire block, and police had to protect firefighters from snipers. On the 22nd, the National Guard rolled into York with tanks, jeeps, and armored cars, and their presence combined with harsh rains tempered the unrest. By the 25th, the Guard was able to leave as the city settled into a state of relative calm. The York conflagration came less than a year and a half after the publication of the Kerner report, which, as I stated above, argued in its summary that riots across the country resulted from the attitude and behavior of white Americans toward African-Americans. I read the following scene as Updike's attempt to capture, through dialogue, the widespread white ignorance about the relationship between institutional racism, poverty, and urban unrest. He also suggests the need for the sort of education he models in the third section of the novel. Springer's take on the York situation, as it was unfolding that morning of July 19th, shows that he feels no responsibility for the violence and suggests how he would have angrily dismissed

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the Commission's report from the year before. Springer actually plays the role of the victim as he laments to his son-in-law, "Sniper fire four nights in a row, Harry. What is the world coming to? We're so defenseless, is what strikes me, we're so defenseless against the violent few. All our institutions have been based on trust" (68). Due to the scene with Janice the night before, a preoccupied Harry barely contributes to the conversation. Harry's son, the twelve-year-old Nelson, however, counters that "It's the only way they can get justice, Grandpa. Our laws defend property instead of people." Springer responds that such riots are turning him, as well as "many a white man of good will" such as him, against the blacks. In a perversion of Kerner's argument, Springer contends that racial animosity of whites toward blacks is the result, rather than the cause, of urban unrest. He concludes by asserting that Vietnam did not defeat Humphrey; instead, "it was law and order in the streets. That's the issue that the common man votes upon" (68). Via Springer, Updike highlights the cynicism propelling the electoral realignment that Republicans hoped would make them the new majority party. Fred Springer prefers to leave the economic system functioning as is, to the benefit of the top strata, while underscoring the key component of the Social Issue, law and order, to win the vote of "the common man." Updike demonstrates here how Conservatives racially frame the issue of law and order as a means of enticing the "common man" to vote against his own economic self-interest. Updike has Springer voice a cultural populism that posits the powerful as defenseless and the subjugated as oppressive. Springer strongly suggests the warped sense of victimhood that permeates the conservative movement, a contagious martyrdom fueled by resentment and a refusal to consider root causes of poverty and unrest.

Race, Flag Decals, and the Vietnam War Perhaps one of the most prevalent symbols of the resentment-fueled cultural populism of the time was the American flag decal. As I discuss in my first chapter, Newsweek's special report on the troubled white majority states that flag decals appearing in car windows at the time were designed to symbolize a reassertion of traditional values. As I also discuss in Chapter One, Time hailed Middle Americans as their men and women of the year for 1969, and their laudatory article also notes the proliferation of flag decals and declares the moon landing, around which the first section of Rabbit Redux revolves, to be a Middle American achievement. In Updike's Middle American tale, the flag decal in the back windshield of Harry's Falcon functions as an important motif. Updike utilizes the flag decal to signify Harry's possessiveness of the idealized America of his childhood. He regards this America as in a perilous state, in need of protection from dangerous forces already within the gates. Harry finds Brewer's African Americans, with whom he shares bus rides during his commute home from work, particularly troubling. Updike describes Harry's racial point of view as more complicated than his father's; there exists in his mind an on-going dialectic between open-mindedness and prejudice that I read as reflecting the two sides of the author sketched above: the Harvard-educated eastern liberal and the Shillington native accustomed to hearing racist harangues such as Earl's. On the bus very early in the novel, Harry's first thought is that there are "too many Negroes" (10). He knows that although "they've been here all along," when he was a kid "they just looked; but now they're noisier." Updike's liberal use of "they" indicates the extent to which Harry sees African Americans as completely different from himself. Despite the proximity to blacks that public transportation has forced upon him, his thoughts indicate that he watches them from a perched distance. He takes note of the preponderance of bushy Afros, and replies to 111

himself that "That's O.K., it's more Nature, Nature is what we're running out of." His thoughts turn toward the two black men who work in his shop, Farnsworth and Buchanan, whom he admires for their ability to laugh, for he acknowledges that it is "Sad business being a Negro man, always underpaid." And as if to prevent himself from following this stream of thought into realms of empathy and camaraderie, Harry interrupts himself again and asserts that "their eyes don't look like our eyes, bloodshot, brown, liquid in them about to quiver out." His distance reestablished, he ponders having "read somewhere some anthropologist thinks Negroes instead of being more primitive are the latest thing to evolve, the newest man." He counters this thought with the claim that blacks are "certainly dumber," but replies that "being smart hasn't amounted to so much, the bomb and the one-piece aluminum beer can," adding that "you can't say Bill Cosby's stupid." Updike then overtly tells the reader that anxiety drives Harry's internal discord; the narration states that "against these educated tolerant thoughts leans a certain fear," and Harry's mind bounces from popular culture back to something of an anthropological mindset as he rides along studying what he considers to be this "strange race." He considers their and hair, and the way in which "they're put together, loose-jointed like lions." Despite his best efforts, Harry cannot help but see his fellow passengers as threatening, exotic others:

It's as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it's his garden and that's why he's put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it's corny and fascist. (10)

Harry's flag decal is thus a sign of defiance, a (white Middle American) backlash against the Civil Rights Movement that he thinks has overly-emboldened African Americans, that has transformed them from timid, conservatively-dressed people with close-cropped hair who knew their place into boisterous, garishly-attired individuals who are increasingly unafraid to reap the bounty of the American garden that he is unwilling to share. The garden imagery indicates both a paradisiacal Garden of Eden and Harry's youth, a time he was known as Rabbit. A garden is heaven for a rabbit, and I will discuss below how Harry envisions the America of his childhood as paradise. By introducing the flag decal in the context of an internal dialogue depicting the American paradise of Harry's youth being invaded by an angst-provoking other, Updike shows it to be infused with fear and resentment, a symbol of tradition in the most oppressive sense of the word. The fact that Harry's wife, Janice, thinks the flag decal is "corny and fascist" suggests the extent to which, reminiscent of the reaction to Nixon's Checker's Speech from the early fifties, the nation had split into (at least) two ideological camps. On the one side are people like Harry, to whom Janice refers as "silent majority" (40), the true believers with faith in an unerring, virtuous America; on the other side are those with a perspective of America's history and place in the world that ranges from realistic to outright cynical. These Americas could and did encounter the same symbol, in this case the flag decal, and invest it with diametrically opposed meanings. Harry and Stavros, the salesman at Springer Motors with whom Janice is having her affair, begin a heated argument over the Vietnam War when Stavros invidiously mentions to Harry, "'I see the decal you put on your old Falcon'" (38). Janice chimes in, "'I told Charlie, I certainly didn't put it there,'" which compels Harry to defensively ask, "'What's wrong with it? It's our flag, isn't it?'" Stavros contends that the flag is just a piece of cloth, while Harry fervently asserts that it means more than that to him. Stavros asks Harry about what it does mean to him but refuses to let him

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finish any of the sentences he offers in answer to the question (37-38). Stavros belies his initial claim that he sees the flag as merely a piece of cloth. He tells Harry that for him "'his little sticker'" connotes "'cops bopping hippies on the head and the Pentagon playing cowboys and Indians all over the globe,'" adding that "'It means screw the blacks and send the CIA into Greece'" (108). Stavros' "'screw the blacks'" interpretation takes on particular resonance when considered in light of the context in which Updike introduces the decal, and it indicates the character's astuteness. His other remarks likely refer to the Chicago Democratic National Convention, various overseas adventures such as the Vietnam War, and covert Cold War intrigue. In short, he interprets the flag as a symbol of , , and racism. This is surely strong medicine for the white, working-class Harry Angstrom, a man who, like so many of his brethren who were "rediscovered" after the publication of the Hamill piece in the Spring of 1969, was fed up with such assaults on patriotism, was tired of – as today's conservative talk radio still puts it – the blame-America-first crowd, and was sick of – as the president would put it in 1970 while campaigning during the midterm elections – those "who see nothing right with America" (Mason 108). Harry also exemplifies the "odd sort of know-nothingism" that Hamill describes permeating veteran's clubs in working-class neighborhoods, an observation he makes in reference to an intractable refusal to question the merits of America's involvement in Vietnam (Hamill "Revolt" 28). When Janice, who has taken Stavros' side, teasingly points out how "'little and tight'" Harry's mouth gets when he thinks about politics, Harry replies, "'I don't think about politics. That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics'" (Redux 38). Here Updike insinuates that the political views of his protagonist – and by extension, Middle America – stem from a dogmatic refusal to question the motives and actions of his country. Ristoff argues that by "having a pleasant character like Stavros reacting to a narrow-minded and racist Rabbit, the reader is led to believe that Stavros's view of American business-oriented foreign policy is also Updike's" (89). This would have surely seemed to be case before the publication of Updike's Self-Consciousness and his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom, which Ristoff's work precedes. Having the advantage of access to these later works, I read the Stavros character as a means for Updike to work through the challenges to his own faith-based patriotism; through the writing of his novel, he attempts to come to terms with the crashing of America's patriotic myth of invincible virtue. During the Stavros scene, Updike recreates arguments over Vietnam, described in "On Not Being a Dove," when his own face would get hot, his voice high and tense, and his heart would race in a panic. Updike, in Redux, describes Harry as "frantic," and his voice is so loud that Janice fears they will be thrown out of the restaurant (39). Harry's defense of America, like Updike's and most of Middle America's, has a profoundly existentialist component; Harry argues to protect the America of his childhood, the very core of his being. Updike subtly shows know-nothingism to be a defense mechanism, a shell of willful ignorance that protects the most vulnerable part of Harry's self. Hamill also connects know-nothingism with patriotism, explaining that members of the working-class often approach displays of patriotism "with a kind of religious fervor" ("Revolt" 28), and Updike presents Harry throughout the novel as regarding his country with a religiosity that forgoes reason in favor of faith. The author explains that when his protagonist as a young boy first heard the phrase "American dream," "he pictured God lying sleeping, the quilt-colored map of the U.S. coming out of his head like a cloud" (Redux 98). As an adult, Harry has held on to this notion of America as God's dream fulfilled. When Stavros sums up the Vietnam War as "a mistaken power play" on the part of Kennedy and then Johnson, Updike describes Harry as

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locked into his intuition that to describe any of America's actions as a "power play" is to miss the point. America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. (40-41)

Harry argues from intuition, as opposed to conscious reasoning, that America is busy doing the Lord's work, making the expansion of His American Dream a reality. Indeed, Harry goes so far as to claim that "'all we want to do'" in Vietnam is "'make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations,'" adding that LBJ "'just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the damn Union if they'd just stop throwing bombs'" (39). To Harry, the American bombers are on a mission of creative destruction, destroying the hell of tyranny so that a uniquely American, God-sanctioned paradisiacal freedom can arise in its place. Within this mindset, Stavros and other such cynics of America's motives are blasphemous, while radical protestors are flat-out evil. Updike thus articulates the doctrinaire nationalism that led to the Riots in the Spring of 1970, and he captures the fervor on which conservative strategists based their hopes that patriotic themes could trump economic concerns and entice "little men" such as Harry and Earl to vote Republican.

Jill—Updike's Take on the Hippie Perspective After Janice leaves, Harry is approached at work by Buchanan, a black coworker who inquires about his domestic situation and invites him to an evening out at Jimbo's Friendly Lounge. Rabbit feels uncomfortable there that evening because he is initially the only white person in the place, but he settles in with alcohol and his first-ever joint. When Jill arrives, Harry begins to piece together why Buchanan has asked him out for the evening. Through insinuations and side-conversations, Harry gathers that Jill was a junkie that Babe, a singer at the lounge, took in and helped to get clean. The presence of the young, blond runaway has brought a conspicuousness to the Lounge, Babe, and her crowd, so they need Harry to take in Jill. Harry eventually agrees, and into his Middle American world comes a young radical from a wealthy family. Updike immediately underscores this class-based political tension between Jill and Harry. In her , the author depicts Jill as "standing there prim;" then, after she has sat down, he employs staccato phrasing to describe her "Teaparty manner. Hands in lap. Thin arms. Freckles. Rabbit scents in her the perfume of class" (107-08). Her curt responses to Harry's questions lead Updike to assess the situation through the lens of Harry's personal history and political beliefs: "She is pulling rank. He is Penn Villas, she is Penn Park. Rich kids make all the trouble" (110). Penn Park is Brewer's wealthiest suburb, and the notion of rich kids making trouble conjures in the reader images of campus unrest and sets up the inevitable clash over the Vietnam War. When it comes, Harry tells her that he just does not "like the kids making the criticisms." Then, feeling himself getting as worked up as he was in the restaurant with Stavros, he fumes,

I guess I don't much believe in college kids or the Viet Cong. I don't think they have any answers. I think they're minorities trying to bring down everything that halfway works. Halfway isn't all the way but it's better than no way. (112)

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Here Harry subtly, in Nixonian fashion, connects college kids protesting the war to the Viet Cong, to enemies of America. In so doing he also plays the populist card. He states that both camps are in the minority, thereby solidifying his Silent Majority credentials. Harry sees himself and his Middle American compatriots as possessing a common-sense, pragmatic, and realistic (halfway is better than no way) view of the situation that stands in contrast to the impractical, unreasonable, and irrational stance of the out-of-touch elitists, the rich young radicals, who refuse to acknowledge all that is good in America. Updike indeed uses Jill to argue that the rich young radicals she represents are out of touch with how actual working people live. Harry notes that her wristwatch must have cost at least two hundred dollars, and when he explains that Janice took the car when she left him, Jill is baffled that their family does not have another. She herself received a white Porsche for her sixteenth birthday, but it was towed away in Brewer and she had not yet bothered to redeem it. Her first reaction to the Angstrom's living room is to exclaim, "Wow, this is really tacky," a comment that comes across as a snobbish dismissal by the Eastern establishment and indicates that Updike has an ax to grind against them. To emphasize her elite status, Updike depicts Jill as having grown up in Stonington, Connecticut, which she explains is the only town in the state that faces the open sea rather than the Sound, and her family enjoyed sailing and, apparently, tasteful furniture (116-121). Updike also uses Jill to articulate his conception of the hippie perspective. Marshall Boswell acknowledges that Updike criticizes Jill's hippie philosophy as being based in "the kind of prosperity and leisure" necessary for such a rebellion as hers, and he reads Updike as suggesting that material goods might be easy to disregard for somebody who has never had to labor for the money to pay for them (Tetralogy 98). However, he contends that "Jill is not merely the object of Updike's facile, polemical attack on hippies," and he argues that Updike draws her as "a lost soul who demands our sympathy and respect," which, he writes, she gets from Harry. Furthermore, Boswell goes so far as to state that "Updike rises above his reflexive dismissal of her hippie ideals," and she forces Harry to confront and question his own principles (99). I agree that Jill does, in conjunction with Skeeter, inspire Harry to challenge his most cherished beliefs about America, especially its racial history, a challenge that reflects the charge of the Kerner Commission. And while the Kerner Commission reflects an alliance of the so-called white liberal establishment and poor African Americans, there was nothing hippie-ish, or even radical, about it. In addition to the important role she plays in initiating Harry's education, I argue that Updike does employ Jill as a means of criticizing hippies, but I do not see his attack as facile or reflexive. Updike implicitly critiques Jill's worldview, despite her counter-cultural aspirations, as being filtered through the lens of America's consumer culture. Harry finds her books, which include titles dealing with yoga, psychiatry, and Zen, "spooky" (135). Reading from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, Harry's reaction highlights the extent to which each of these realms of thought have been, albeit in an Americanized form, absorbed into the mainstream since the 1960s. Jill seems to aspire to a kind of Eastern mysticism, but Updike shows that her thoughts remain rooted in the West. While she laments that "our egos make us deaf" and "our egos make us blind," and while she speaks of "ecstasy" and "energy," her perspective includes a God that acts as a separate creator: "The world is what God made and it doesn't stink of money, it's never tired, too much or too little, it's always exactly full" (136). Earlier in the novel, she explains to Harry that she would see God during psychedelic

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experiences (124). Updike thus makes a point that Jill accessed God through an act of consumption, as opposed to ascetic self-denial. The author suggests that while hippies rail against capitalistic greed, against the "stink of money," they remain American consumers. Their hedonism is a logical extension of the consumer ethos in which access to God can be had through indulgence, salvation via consumption. Jill attacks greed because of its negative impact on beauty and pleasure, virtues she wants to spread throughout the world. She argues that "these houses are so ugly" – meaning Harry's tacky abode and others like them – because "all the corners they cut to make a profit are still in them." The cathedrals, by contrast, exude beauty because of the purity of the motives that put their existence into being; Jill suggests they were not-for-profit endeavors that sought to celebrate God. She sees in nature a state of "'play'" (italics hers), "'even in thunder or an avalanche,'" and she recognizes the existence of music in the stars (136). Harry's utilitarian perspective contrasts with Jill's fancifulness, and when he suggests, based on an article for which he set the type, that Jupiter may be able to sustain life, Jill scolds him for his "'Puritan fear of waste'" that makes him hope for that: "'You think the other planets must be used for something, must be farmed.'" Harry does not deny this, for when things are going well between them, he and Jill find each other charming. Harry considers her "blithe," and she playfully calls him "cynical." He counters that he is merely "middle-aged" (138-39). This playfulness gives way to a bitter argument when Harry begins to worry over her influence on Nelson. In his struggle to impart to his son a traditional Middle American worldview that lauds individualism and the spirit of competition, Harry is clearly losing to the ethos of the counterculture. Although he worries over the impact Jill is having on his son's thinking, Nelson already seemed inclined to her view of the world before she arrived on the scene. In addition to the points he makes to Fred Springer about the York riots, Nelson, early in the story, explains to Harry that he has lost his interest in sports because they "'are square now. Nobody does it.'" Harry takes this opportunity to speak for all the corny old squares of Middle America as he asks in reply, "'Well, what isn't square now? Besides pill-popping and draft-dodging. And letting your hair grow down into your eyes?'" (15-16). In a later scene, but also before Jill's appearance, Nelson explains that he does not enjoy sports as much as his dad because "'It's all so competitive.'" Harry counters practically that life is "'dog eat dog,'" and his son laments in reply "'Why can't things just be nice? There's enough stuff for everybody to share'" (66). Thus, when the opportunity presents itself after he finds out that Jill and Nelson have been hustling, he takes out his frustration toward all of the counterculture on Jill. Upon entering his house after a long day at work and a quick drink with his dad, Harry hears Jill and Nelson singing "Blowing In The Wind," an anthem of change that made its way from the peace rallies, campuses, and television to the heart of Harry's Middle American home. When Harry walks into Nelson's room, the scene of the mini hootenanny, he notices that his son has removed his old posters of Brooks Robinson and Orlando Cepeda, two major league baseball players, and Steve McQueen, the action film star and paragon of rugged, individualist masculinity. In his excitement, Nelson utilizes hippie vernacular to describe hustling – which Jill and he did to scare up enough money for the guitar – as "'a gas,'" and he nonchalantly mentions having to move to another location after "'a pig car'" slowed down and suspiciously eyed them. Nelson also details the various specifics of Jill's con, and naively recounts to Harry that the man at the music store gave them a forty-four dollar guitar and sheet music for twenty dollars "'after Jill talked to him in the back room.'" About their , Nelson rationalizes that "'there was nothing dishonest about it, these people we stopped felt better afterwards, for having got us off

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their conscience.'" Finally, as if to show the extent to which he has adopted a perspective at odds with Harry's socially conservative view of the world, Nelson concludes, "'Anyway, Dad, in a society where power was all to the people money wouldn't exist anyway, you'd just be given what you need'" (143-44). Like many Middle American social conservatives, including Nixon, Harry's stance in protection of his values is tinged with class resentment. He rails against Jill for turning Nelson "'into a beggar and a whore just like yourself,'" and when she refuses to engage him he slaps "her thin disdainful face with its prim lips and its green eyes drenched so dark in defiance their shade is as of tree leaves, a shuffling concealing multitude, a microscopic forest he wants to bomb" (145). Jill's primness was the first thing Harry noticed about her when he met her, an attribute of hers he immediately associates with her class status. Harry has been nursing a class-based grudge at least since this "rich bitch call[ed] his living room tacky" (122), and when presented with this chance to slap her face full of disdain – disdain for his furniture, disdain for his lack of a car, and disdain for his views on the Vietnam War – he indulges it. And as he had when the subject of Vietnam came up during their first conversation, Harry sees her dissent as support for the enemy. In his fury, he no longer merely wants to protect Nelson, he wants to protect his country and his soldiers. Harry looks into Jill's eyes and sees a dark dense forest he wants to bomb because they conceal the Viet Cong; they give aid and comfort to the enemy. In his rage against all the young rich traitorous radicals that Jill represents, Harry slaps her again and even grabs her hair to steady her for a blow to the side of her neck (145). Markle observes that for the novel's main metaphors Updike draws on three central concerns of 1969 America: space missions, the Vietnam War, and black militancy (147). The author employs war imagery to describe Harry's relationships with Janice and Jill, which does not excuse, but goes some way toward explaining, Harry's violence toward women. Updike suggests the origin of such a combative conceptualization of relationships in Self-Consciousness, when he speculates that his stance on the war may have been, in part, a response to his wife's "reflexive liberalism," and that he perhaps "assumed these views out of a certain hostility to her, and was protesting against our marriage" (134). The Vietnam-based metaphors in Redux exude different degrees of hostility, from the extreme malevolence of Harry recognizing in Jill's eyes the need for napalm to more of a slow-burning long-term resentment that he has felt toward Janice over the past decade. When Janice tries to explain to Stavros why she thinks her husband returned to her and Nelson after he abandoned them in Rabbit, Run, he astutely jokes, "'I get it. You're his overseas commitment'" (46). In this conceptualization of his relationship with Janice (and Nelson), Harry represents an America that cannot extract itself from an undeclared war of a marriage, while Janice becomes a member of the native population engaged in treachery. The issue of class also plays a significant role in these hostilely conceived relationships. Updike strongly suggests that his reflexively liberal first wife was part of the well-off Harvard- Radcliffe Democrats from his undergraduate days (Self-Consciousness 118-19), and Janice and Jill both come from families significantly better off than the Angstroms. Updike may have thought that this violent, class-based resentment would also sit more becomingly on Harry than him and thus projected his own impulses onto Harry, but in so doing he also suggests that class supremacy trumps physical strength. Despite being physically overpowered, Updike portrays Jill as maintaining her class superiority. He describes her words as "calm and superior," and she calls him out for wanting the "kick" of hurting her. She understands the frustration that permeates his life, and like others of her age who want to change how the system runs, she cannot grasp why he resents their efforts:

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"'What have the pig laws ever done for you except screw you into a greasy job and turn you into such a gutless creep you can't even keep your idiotic wife?'" (145). Aside from the specificity of Harry's marital situation, Jill's question could be read as being posed by all of the so-called radicals of the era to all of the socially conservative, "love it or leave it" blue collar workers stuck in the grind of unrewarding work. Here Updike captures one of the era's truly counterintuitive dynamics. Jill and other such children of privilege want to change a system that has nestled them in comfort and advantage, and they run into the fiercest resistance from the people stuck fighting the wars and working the most drudging jobs. From his point of view, Harry is just as baffled. He tells Jill that "'you rich kids playing at life make me sick, throwing rocks at the poor dumb cops protecting your daddy's loot'" (145). Harry cannot comprehend her rejection of a system that has so benefited her family and her, and ultimately chalks it up to her privileged upbringing:

"You've tried everything and you're not scared of nothing and you wonder why it's all so dead. You've had it handed to you, sweet baby, that's why it's so dead. Fucking Christ you think you're going to make the world over you don't have a fucking clue what makes people run. Fear. That's what makes us poor bastards run. You don't know what fear is, do you, poor baby?" (145-46)

Boswell, whose focus is more theological than political, argues that Harry's grammatical slip, "not scared of nothing," is intentional. When Harry talks about the fear that drives the world, Boswell states that he "is not talking of the kind of fear that is distinguishable from angst. He is talking about angst itself—that is, the fear of nothing" (Tetralogy 99). Harry does fear nothingness, but this angst is elicited by Jill and other such radicals intent on bringing about the crash of America's patriotic myth of invincible virtue. Jill, in other words, is intent on burning away the America in God's dream cloud as imagined by the young Harry Angstrom. For Harry, the political and the theological are inextricably linked and bound up with his conception of his core self, the boy who imagined God dreaming up America. As Jill and the radicals destroy this America, they take with them God and Harry's essential being. Through this dramatization Updike reminds the reader that whatever positive ideals motivated the social upheavals that defined the decade then drawing to a close, those changes elicited in much of Middle America fear, anxiety, and resentment. Despite his modeling of what the education of such a Middle American might entail, I argue that Updike fails to adequately demonstrate the process of working through such angst-ridden bitterness, the fuel for much of the conservative movement.

Skeeter, Class Alignments, and the Education of Harry Angstrom Updike utilizes the arrival of Skeeter to challenge the willful ignorance that feeds Harry's resentment. Arrested during the bust at Jimbo's, Skeeter explains to Harry that he is "'way out on bail. I have jumped the blessed thing'" (179). When Harry questions this decision, arguing that he could have gotten a suspended sentence due to his service in Vietnam, Skeeter states that

"It dawns upon me that you have a white gentleman's concept of the police and their exemplary works. There is nothing, let me repeat no thing, that gives them more pleasurable sensations than pulling the wings off of witless poor black men. First the fingernails, then the wings. Truly, they are constituted for that very sacred purpose. To keep me off your back and under your smelly feet, right?" (180)

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Harry contests this, arguing that "'This isn't the South.'" Skeeter cites the Detroit riots as evidence that "'Lynching season is on,'" that "'everybody's done become a cracker'" (181). After Skeeter goads Harry into a physical altercation with him, Harry agrees to let him stay, perhaps because Harry gets the better of him in their scuffle. Harry later sets the type for the article detailing the bust, and he learns that Skeeter's real name is Hubert H. Farnsworth (188), the son of one of his coworkers, and is presumably named after Hubert H. Humphrey. As I explain above, Humphrey cajoled his party in 1948 to take up the struggle for civil rights and set the stage for the exodus of segregationists from the Democratic Party. Thus, just as the counterculture made its way from the news to his home in the form of Jill, Harry now has a representative of the civil rights movement, albeit one far more eccentric than its mainstream representatives, in Skeeter. As if in a nod to Humphrey's speech that elicited Strom Thurmond's walkout, Skeeter says of Nixon, "'That honky was put there by the cracker vote, right? Strom Stormtrooper is his very bag'" (196). By connecting Skeeter to Humphrey, and Nixon's election to Thurmond, Updike insinuates that Skeeter – with his intelligence, lack of fear, dark shades, Afro, and affinity for sex with white girls – represents to Middle America a civil rights movement that has gone too far, and has made them willing to follow the path blazed by Thurmond – and later Wallace – out of the Democratic Party. In the house, Skeeter and Jill join against Harry in a microcosm of the "Negroes plus the rich kids" alignment that worries Harry. They join sides in an effort to widen the scope of Harry's perspective, and set out to educate him. Critical reaction to Skeeter has varied markedly. Markle accepts Skeeter as a Jesus figure within the logic of the novel, and she notes that history is his theology (149-50). Donald J. Greiner asserts, by contrast, that "Skeeter is death," but he lauds his literary merits as "a brilliant creation" (78). Ralph C. Wood refers to Skeeter as a "criminal pseudo-Christ" and "a demon" (139); and George W. Hunt strikes a similar chord, pronouncing Skeeter "a despicable character" (179). Robert Detweiler dismisses Skeeter's religious claims by barely mentioning them, and asserts that the character is both paranoid and schizophrenic (136). In the New York Times Book Review, Richard Locke presents Skeeter as "clearly the Antichrist" and a preacher of "religious nihilism." However, he contends that the character "is anything but an allegorical cut-out," and lauds Updike's depiction: "The wide range of tones and rhythms in black speech has never been so well reproduced in contemporary white writing" (BR 1). Edward P. Vargo, in his Rainstorms and Fire, cites Locke's review in an endnote and makes essentially the same point about Skeeter's status as a nihilistic anti-Christ, adding that he "is probably the most vibrant and credible black in literature written by a white man" (160). Lyons vociferously disagrees and declares that "Seldom, if ever, has any white writer been paralyzed into sentimental and self- contradictory blather quite so foolish in attempting to deal with a black character" (57-58). Other writers question the sources Updike drew upon for his characterization. Mariann Russell, while arguing that Updike draws Skeeter as "less than a whole character" designed to function as an "other" and "quite literally a black messiah to the book's protagonist" (97, 93), points out that "Skeeter's character is a mix of black types familiar from newspaper and television images. He is black Vietnam veteran, pusher, nationalist, sexist, and preacher of doom" (96). It is with such media in mind that William H. Pritchard seems to ask "What did Updike know about black revolutionary rhetoric of the sort Skeeter spouts? Isn't this improbable character, made up out of newspaper accounts of African-American rhetoric in the late 1960s, a parodic simplification of any 'real' black militant?" (164-65). He is ultimately positive about the novel, though, and praises Updike for his attempt to bring together into one novel the chaos of

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the times, and acknowledges that "Skeeter is a voice, and Updike's ventriloquizing it, his impersonating of it, is never less than resourceful" (165). In the interview with Melvyn Bragg, Updike seems to address and anticipate such criticism, admitting that Skeeter "was an audacious thing for me to attempt. For a white small-town boy to try to write about a militant black is audacious. My experience with American blacks was quite limited, but in the sixties there was no avoiding black anger" (224). Since his experience had been limited, he relied on media depictions of such figures as Eldridge Cleaver and other such figures who "had all made the angry black a newspaper figure and a figure on campuses" (224). With Cleaver in mind, Robinson asserts in her eighth endnote that with his depiction of Skeeter, Updike participates in a construction of blackness that was, by 1971, "already old news." She reads his portrayal of Skeeter as owing to Mailer's "The White Negro" and Cleaver's Soul on Ice and suggests that since images of black masculinity had become more threatening since their respective publications, Rabbit Redux can be read as a nostalgic look back at a safer time rather than into an age when black power threatens, rather than energizes, whiteness (360). I contend, however, that Rabbit Redux addresses how threatened Harry is by Skeeter and other African Americans, and I read the novel as arguing that this intimidation comes from a place of ignorance, which he is loath to let go. Harry's mind is a dialectic between educated tolerant thoughts and a willful ignorance driven by fear, which, as I have argued, Updike constructs to give form to the conflict between the Eastern liberal and Shillington Middle American sides of his own self. Harry's apprehension to probe the depths of knowledge manifests itself in physical illness, and the mere sight of Skeeter's books nauseate him. Updike describes how titles by Du Bois, Fanon, Cleaver, Frederick Douglass, Marx, and additional works that deal with history and economics make Harry "feel sick, as when he thinks about what surgeons do, or all the plumbing and gas lines there are under the street" (197). In an interview with Michael Sragow, the author makes this comparison even more explicit:

[…] all these investigations of our origins and terrible flaws, the built-in problems of the way things work in America is a little like scouring the plumbing in your own home…It's hard for some of us to get down in the cellar. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. (61)

Politically speaking, Harry has contented himself with superficial and cursory summations, bromides and platitudes, sensing all the while that the gore and guts of the issues reside beneath the surface, down deep where it gets bloody, dirty, and complicated. Updike hints at the role Skeeter will play when Harry, deciding whether or not to let Skeeter stay with him, remembers being a curious child and lifting the lid on his family's backyard cesspool to look into the pit and smell the stench (Redux 181). As Updike told Jeff Campbell, Skeeter is a headline figure who makes "all the things we preferred not to think about become unavoidable" (90); Skeeter, in other words, will entice Harry to lift the lid of American history and breathe in what he knew was there but preferred to ignore. Now, with Skeeter in his home, Harry, ever the mixture of curiosity and fear, picks up the Du Bois book and randomly reads a paragraph to himself, which frightens him as mummies used to frighten him when he saw them in their caskets on school trips to the museum: "Unthinkably distant lives, abysses of existence, worse than what crawls blind on ocean floors" (Redux 198). The notion of the ocean floor illustrates Harry's resistance to the submerged, and the author's use of the word "abysses" suggests both intellectual depth and something bottomless, chaotic, and unfathomable. That the lives are "unthinkably distant" recalls Harry's ruminations on the bus about Brewer's blacks: he refuses to recognize the connection

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between himself and cultures he sees only as other. The passage also indicates, via the same phrase "unthinkably distant lives," that Harry fails to grasp the connection between the present and the past, that he lacks historical context. For this reason, Jill cajoles him into sitting with Skeeter, her, and Nelson for "a structured discussion" that will enable him to better understand Skeeter and the racial turmoil of the time:

[…] the reason Skeeter annoys and frightens you is you don't know a thing about his history, I don't mean his personal history so much as the history of his race, how he got to where he is. Things that threaten you like riots and welfare have jumped into the newspapers out of nowhere for you. So for tonight we thought we would just talk a little, have a kind of seminar, about Afro-American history. (198-99)

Jill's articulation of why Harry needs such a seminar reads similarly to the Kerner Commission's call for "new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will" ("Text Summary"). She also conjures the spirit of the commission when she states that for Harry riots and welfare must seem as though they came out of nowhere, for the Commission's account called to task the media for failing to report on the causes (and consequences) of the riots, and for neglecting to contextualize them in the greater framework of institutional racism and "a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto" ("Text Summary"). Harry represents the target audience of the Kerner Commission, a Middle American beseeched by liberals such as John Lindsay to open their minds to the muck and muddle of his country's racial history, to eschew the depthlessness of nationalistic decals, bumper sticker sloganeering, and notions of divinely-sanctioned patriotism to appreciate the riots and other aspects of racial unrest as the logical result of complicated and unsavory decisions made by men who lived what seems like unthinkably distant lives in the subterranean depths of the abysmal past. The first night of the history lessons, Skeeter skips over slavery since "'it was forever ago'" and "'everybody used to do it.'" In flamboyant language, he bobs and weaves toward his main concern, Lincoln's motive for fighting the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction. "'Lincoln got this war, right, and fought it for a bunch of wrong reasons – what's so sacred about a Union, just a power trust, right? – and for another wrong reason freed the slaves, and it was done'" (200). While Skeeter implies that Lincoln fought the war to save the Union, which he sees in starkly economic terms, he never explains Lincoln's reason for freeing the slaves. Harry lets Skeeter smoke a joint, which he shares with Jill, as he walks Harry through African American history: "'So then you had these four million freed slaves without property or jobs in this economy dead on its feet thinking the halleluiah days had come'" (201). Skeeter describes the way in which former slaves attained literacy, set up public school systems, and sent leaders to the U.S. Senate while "'the crackers down there were frothing at the mouth and calling our black heroes baboons'" (201-02). The Southern whites could do nothing as long as the Northern armies occupied the region, but before long the North "'copped out. It pulled out.'" Skeeter argues that the disputed election of 1876 was "'the revolution of 1876. Far as the black man goes, that's the '76 that hurt'" (202). Skeeter refers here to the disputed election of 1876, when the Republicans ran Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio against New York's Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden won the popular vote, but the disputed returns from key states left him one electoral college vote short of victory. Constitutional vagueness plus the fact that the Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats the House further complicated the matter. Congress created an electoral commission,

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which, by a margin of 8 to 7, awarded every disputed electoral vote to Hayes. Congress ratified these results only after a series of compromises involving leaders of each party. Historian Alan Brinkley argues that the Compromise of 1877 is more complicated than the traditional narrative that asserts that agreed to Hayes' election after he pledged to withdraw Northern troops from the South since Hayes had put himself on the record as supporting troop withdrawal during the campaign. Southern Democrats agreed to seat Hayes in exchange for, among other things, federal funds for internal improvements and support for railroads in addition to the already agreed upon withdrawal of Northern troops. As Brinkley puts it,

Many of the Conservatives who controlled the Democratic parties of the redeemed Southern states were interested in industrializing the South, and they believed that the Republican program of federal aid to business would be more beneficial for their region than the archaic states' rights policy of the Democrats. (American History 474-76)

This passage reflects the economic lens through which Skeeter reads the controversy. Skeeter stresses to Harry that the motivation for the premature and unsatisfactory end of Reconstruction was economic, and that the resultant rise of Jim Crow was a consequence the industrial interests were willing to accept. Skeeter recounts the story as "'The Southern assholes got together with the Northern assholes and said, Let's do a deal. What's all this about democracy, let's have here a dollar-cracy. Why'd we ever care, free versus slave? Capital versus labor, that's where it's at, right?'" The result of the compromise, according to Skeeter, was "'North and West, robber barons and slums. Down South, one big nigger barbecue.'" From there he depicts for Harry the atrocities of the Jim Crow South in graphic detail, and sums up the compromise this way:

"The South got slavery back at half the price, it got control of Congress back by counting the black votes that couldn't be cast, the North got the cotton money it needed for capital, and everybody got the fun of shitting on the black man and then holding their noses." (Redux 203)

Harry tells Skeeter, when asked, that he believes all of what Skeeter says, and Skeeter implicates Harry and the rest of white America: "'You sold us out, right? You sold yourselves out.'" Instead of lifting up blacks when they faithfully held out that hand, Skeeter accuses Harry of taking "'that greedy turn,'" adding "'you gave us a kick, you put us down'" (203). Skeeter works toward the end of the evening's teach-in by maneuvering to connect the past to present, to show how what he has explained manifests itself in riots and in Vietnam:

"To keep that capitalist thing rolling you let those asshole crackers have their way and now you's all asshole crackers, North and South and however you look there's assholes, you lapped up the poison and now it shows, Chuck, you say America to you and you still get bugles and stars but say it to any black or yellow man and you get hate, right? Man the world does hate you, you're the big pig keeping it all down." (204)

Updike dramatizes an important facet of the era's debate when Harry counters Skeeter by relying on a rhetorical move that both the Kerner Commission and Pete Hamill undermine, equating the immigrant experience with that of Black America's. Harry tells Skeeter that "'We all got here on a

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bad boat,'" asserts that his version of history is "'pure self-pity,'" and adds that "'The real questions is, Where do you go from here?'" To Harry, this is the question because he has lapsed back into sloganeering: "'This is the freest country around, make it if you can, if you can't, die gracefully. But Jesus, stop begging for a free ride'" (204). Updike uses Harry to model resistance to a new understanding and shows slogans and catchphrases to be conversation-stoppers, the equivalent of putting the lid back on the cesspool when the stench gets to be overwhelming. Updike suggests that the ahistorical perspective of social conservatives such as Harry functions as a defense mechanism against discomfiting truths about America's past. Kerner sought to usher in new attitudes and a new understanding that would foster a new will, but Updike indicates that a new, broader understanding might cause a reflexive lapse into old attitudes due to a lack of resolve. During the first session, Harry teetered toward a realization that his country is not perfect, that the complainers of whom he has grown so tired actually have legitimate grievances to express. However, cognitive dissonance, in this case the clash between his concept of America and the facts of its history, push Harry into the warm embrace of jingoism, and he rationalizes Skeeter's lesson so that he can deride those who have been subjugated and oppressed as indulging in "pure self-pity." Still, Harry has begun to evolve. He sleeps soundly with Skeeter in his home, by which Updike implies that even a little education will undermine deeply-rooted fears. Updike uses Skeeter's lessons about slavery, despite the character's initial dismissal the issue, to further challenge Harry's conception of the American Dream, revisit the issue of fear, and to differentiate between the African American slave and white European immigrant experience. Before their next seminar, Skeeter tells Harry that "'The fact upon reflection appears to be that your style of slavery was uniquely and e-specially bad, about the worst indeed this poor blood-soaked globe has ever seen'" (208). For evidence Skeeter differentiates between the Kings of England and Spain. The former cared only about "'tobacco cash, right? Black men just blots on the balance sheet to him.'" The latter, by contrast, "'knew black men from way back; those Moors had run his country and some had been pretty smart.'" Skeeter explains to Harry that Spanish slaves were treated as subjects with legal rights, and the Church recognized slaves' immortal souls, baptized them, and recognized the sanctity of their marriage vows. Furthermore, these and other rights were encoded in law, including the right of a slave, with the means to do so, to redeem him or herself. The English system, on the other hand, refused to recognize the slave as having rights. Their marriages were not recognized, they could not testify in court, and "'There was no such thing, no such, believe me, as the father of a slave child. That was a legal fact.'" Skeeter claims the English law was written that way because "'they did believe a nigger was a piece of shit. And they was scared of their own shit'" (210). He expands on this last point by claiming that whites in America have been "'scared of blacks learning to read, scared of blacks learning a trade, scared of blacks on the job market, there was no place for a freedman to go, once he was freed.'" Updike, via Skeeter's monologue, makes important connections to two previous scenes. Skeeter argues that the United States has never been a place like any other, where "'this happens because that happens,'" in other words, a tangible reality of cause and effect: "'no, sir, this place was never such a place it was a dream, it was a state of mind from those poor fool pilgrims on, right?'" (210). The idea of America existing as a dream recalls Harry's image of God's American Dream. But whereas Harry sees America's acting beyond power, as in a dream, as an indication of his country's metaphysical benevolence, Skeeter perceives such a state of mind as oblivious narcissism: "'All these people around here are walking around inside their own heads, they don't

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even know if you kick somebody else it hurts'" (210-11). In other words, despite its conception of itself, America still exists in a world where, to paraphrase, if this happens, that happens or, if it kicks a racial group within its borders, or bombs another country, it hurts all of those people. Skeeter and Jill are working to educate Harry not just by giving him historical context, but by contextualizing America and its actions in the physical (as opposed to dreamlike) reality of the world. Skeeter voices the argument that the prevalence of such a narcissistic conception of the world has led to some whites seeing blacks as symbols rather than people, and that American Christianity has perpetuated the misconception because the Puritans' version of Jesus "'was the meanest most de-balled Jesus the good Lord ever let run around scaring people'" (211). This holy eunuch Skeeter describes suggests the Puritan aversion to sex and their terror of God's wrath. And without being privy to Jill and Harry's argument about society running on fear or love, Skeeter laments that fear still saturates America: "'Scared, scared. I'm scared of you, you scared of me, Nelson scared of us both, and poor Jilly here so scared of everything she'll run and hide herself in dope again if we don't all act like big daddies to her'" (211). By revisiting that pivotal scene, I read Updike as arguing, through Skeeter, that Harry's notion of society running on fear can be traced back to the Puritans. Recall that Jill had, in an earlier scene, admonished Harry for his "'Puritan fear of waste,'" and when she first pitched to Harry the idea of these nightly educational sessions, she told him, "'You carry an old God with you, and an angry old patriotism. And now an old wife. You accept these things as sacred not out of love or faith but fear'" (199). Updike tells his story in the context of reports of America's changing moral code, which includes Newsweek and Time's depictions of the break from Puritanism and the rise of permissiveness (please see Chapter One). And if the graphic details with which he wrote sex scenes is any indication, the author relished these changes. Although Harry represents Updike's Shillington self, the part of himself of which he is most protective, the author uses these teach-in scenes to criticize the socially conservative, Middle American worldview as anachronistically puritanical, as holding on to a "City on " narcissism, and as driven by irrational fears. Updike dramatizes the backlash that made the late sixties and early seventies Nixon's time, when Middle Americans became afraid of evolving values and racial progress and decided to take a giant leap back from the promise of The Great Society. But Updike's protagonist fascinates because of his internal conflicts, not because he perfectly embodies the resentment Nixon rode into the White House. Harry Angstrom, despite his flag decal and Silent Majority status, not only voted for Humphrey, he dismisses Nixon as "'dumb'" and boring (196). And while Updike does indeed caricature the worst aspects of the Middle American worldview via Harry's rhetoric, any reading of this character must keep in mind that his worldview contains a healthy degree of discord. Harry bought into traditional family values only after fleeing from their net in the first novel, and as I showed during my reading of the bus scene above, fear coexists with the educated and tolerant thoughts in his mind, which indicates Updike's liberal optimism that education will lead to racial tolerance and strongly suggests his motives for the teach-in scenes. The tolerant side of Harry, the side that appreciates knowledge, allows his living room to be the site of readings from a book entitled Slavery, which contains speeches by abolitionists and black leaders. Jill reads aloud a speech from Theodore Parker, Nelson takes a passage from William Lloyd Garrison, and Harry himself, when prompted, reads from a speech by Beverly Nash. Harry starts the evening with the best intentions, telling Skeeter that he likes their evening seminars, "'I like learning stuff. I have an open mind'" (211). But by the end of the night, Harry, "to show Nelson how tough he is,"

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denounces their session as "'bleeding-heart stuff. It'd be like me bellyaching that the Swedes were pushed around by the Finns in the year Zilch'" (215). That he wants to show Nelson how tough he is indicates that part of Harry views know-nothingism as strength; that he concocts a lame analogy about the Swedes and Finns signifies that he – as do the men in Pete Hamill's neighborhood bars and the descendents of immigrants described in the Kerner report – equates ethnicity with race; and that he describes this conflict between the Swedes and Finns as occurring in the year "Zilch" suggests the extent to which he continues to see history as a distant past disconnected from the present. Harry's mind is open, but the fear in it prevents his tolerance from opening it further. He is, put simply, a conflicted character, and as a literary creation he indicates that Updike recognized throughout the whole of Middle America a version of his own internal conflict between his Shillington and Eastern liberal selves. Harry's partially opened mind, combined with his willingness to lick the sugar of the counterculture, set the scene for his first instance of genuine empathy with black Americans. Indeed, perhaps Updike's slyest insinuation is that Middle Americans such as Harry can be plied to the side of the angels with marijuana. Smoking with Harry, Skeeter asks his host how he feels about "'those Penn Park people'" (216). Via Skeeter's vivid descriptions and the impact of THC on his imagination, Harry sees Penn Park as he did when he was a young boy, on top of "a hill he could never climb, because it wasn't a real hill like Mt. Judge." He and his family lived at the bottom of the hill, and his father worked too hard to play catch in the evening, his mother never had jewelry, they ate day-old bread, his father had sore teeth because he did not want to pay a dentist, and now he sees his mother's dying as merely a game being played by Cadillac-driving doctors who live in Penn Park. Harry tells Skeeter simply, "'I hate them,'" and Skeeter's face lights up and he prods, "'Deeper.'" Harry remembers a doctor he recently met, the doctor exiting his parents' house as he was going in to visit his mother. Harry's image of the doctor is of a man sharp and polished, "life licked," irritated at having to stop to shake hands with Earl's son, who introduced the two:

The doctor's irritation at being halted even a second setting a prong of distaste on his upper lip behind the clipped mustache the color of iron. His handshake also metal, arrogant, it pinches Harry's unready hand and says, I am strong, I twist bodies to my will. I am life. I am death. (217)

Harry's haughty image, intertwined with his sensation of being made to feel insignificant and inferior, elicits from him the outburst, "'I hate those Penn Park motherfuckers. If I could push the red button to blow them all to Kingdom Come I would.'" Skeeter grins and acknowledges Harry's righteous rage, "'Ka-boom, right?'" (217). Updike makes a point of noting that Harry "amplifies" and performs for Skeeter, whom he is eager to please. Skeeter being inclined toward the revolutionary, Harry pleases him with bomb imagery. This exaggeration aside, the author suggests that any alliance between whites and blacks need not be limited to white elites and black radicals. Just as Hamill hoped for an alliance between the white and black working classes, who would coalesce, presumably, against the upper economic strata for a fairer distribution of wealth, Updike implies that white workers could learn to empathize with the plight of blacks through remembrances of instances in which they were made to feel second-rate and inconsequential at the hands of the wealthy, such as those who populate Penn Park. The brilliant rhetorical move of the conservative movement was to take that very energy that Updike describes as existing in

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Harry – the resentment exemplified by his simmering rage toward the arrogant doctor on his parents' porch – and direct it away from such economic elites and toward the so-called cultural elites, to channel it away, for example, from the residents of Penn Park and toward Great Society liberals, toward anti-war protestors, toward campus rebels, toward people such as Skeeter and Jill. Some critics point out, however, that a class-based alliance between Harry and Skeeter pits them against Jill. There is of course a gender component at play here, but Updike emphasizes class. Harry resents Jill throughout the novel for her status, and there are indications that the Marx-infused Skeeter does, too. Even when Jill implores Harry to harbor Skeeter, arguing that he had jumped bail because the rotten system protects only "'a tiny elite,'" Skeeter roots on Harry when he snarkily replies "'Like people who own boats in Stonington'" (181). Ensconced in Harry's home weeks later, Skeeter watches the evening news and cheers on the police as they beat members of the Students for a Democratic Society protesting the trial of the Chicago Eight, exclaiming, "'Right on!'" and "'Hit that honky snob again!'" Skeeter explains to a baffled Nelson that "'those crackers'" are only protesting that "'they gotta wait twenty years to get their daddy's share of the pie. They want it now'" (238-39). Such passages suggest that Updike saw the "peculiar attraction" between privileged white radicals and black militants as a fleeting arrangement, and that he recognized doubts – either in himself, militants, or both – in the revolutionary sincerity of wealthy young radicals such as Jill. Any reading of the seemingly shifting alliances between Harry, Skeeter, and Jill depends in large part on how one interprets Jill's death, which occurs at the end of the third section. Jill, passed out from the heroin on which Skeeter has re-hooked her, dies in a fire set by racist neighbors infuriated by the interracial sex (between Jill and Skeeter) going in Harry's house. Harry and Nelson are gone when the fire is set, and Skeeter flees, leaving Jill to perish. Charles Samuels suggests in "Updike in the Present" that Harry lets Skeeter hook and destroy Jill because of the shared class resentment they harbor toward her (64). Uphaus notes that Skeeter makes Harry aware of his buried hatred of well-off professionals to set up her point that Jill's death is "the death of a Penn Park offspring" (86-87). In an interview with Charlie Reilly, Updike acknowledges that he intended from the start to destroy Jill, a death that would be the result of "Rabbit and a, let's say, militant black man in some kind of collusion that will result in the death of a 'flower child'" (133). Aside from the hint offered by the term "collusion," Updike steers away from any notion of class-based animosity and toward how Jill's immolation serves to balance the drowning of little Rebecca in Rabbit, Run:

[…] the death of Jill was designed as a counterpart of sorts to the baby's death. Janice inadvertently kills an innocent in the first book, so Rabbit more or less presides over the destruction of an innocent in the second one. There's a grisly balancing between the two. Each character strays—Rabbit in the first, Janice in the second—and their reconciliation is based at least in some way upon these, if you will, murders. (132)

Marshall Boswell recognizes the balance Jill's death creates and underscores the biblical overtones, stating that "the disaster, in which Jill perishes, replays the drowning of baby Becky from Rabbit, Run. From water we come to fire" ("Black Jesus" 126). Vargo reads the death in a similarly ritualistic fashion, calling Jill's death "the price of cleansing" (169), an idea similar in tone to Alter's take on the novel, who alludes to James Baldwin when he references "the fire this time" in his title.

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For Updike, the political and religious are inextricably linked, from Harry's concept of God dreaming America to the fact, as Markle points out, that history functions as the Messianic Skeeter's theology. And as the Vietnam metaphors I describe above demonstrate, Updike uses the political to illustrate the familial. Jill's fiery after-the-flood death not only restores balance to Janice and Harry's marriage, it suggests that Updike believes, first, that a white and black coalition can only come after the education of white Middle America and second, that such an alliance will be constructed on class-based animosity. This view is consistent with the hostility Updike describes feeling toward wealthy elitists in "On Not Being a Dove," and it squares with the author's opinion, stated there and in an interview with Melvyn Bragg, that "the Civil Rights movement was one of the more constructive turbulent flows" of the 1960s (224). Updike also told Bragg, in the same interview, that each book in the series are "all about" Harry's education (224). While Harry does take obvious steps toward resolving the conflict between his racism and educated, tolerant thoughts, Updike seems to have had what I think is an inflated sense of the success of Harry's education. In the introduction to Rabbit Angstrom, Updike contends that when his protagonist "reads aloud the words of Frederick Douglass, he becomes black, and in a fashion seeks solidarity with Skeeter" (xvi). Markle, years before Updike penned the introduction, put forth the idea that "in the novel's terms," Harry "is becoming black" (159). Edward M. Jackson, in his forthrightly titled essay "Rabbit Is Racist," expresses dubiousness about Harry's progress and declares it "doubtful that Rabbit 'grows' in his racial views" (444). James A. Schiff, by contrast, takes Harry's starting point into account and recognizes a real breakthrough: "The fact that someone like Harry can learn and develop, rise from the prejudice of his father, who sees blacks as 'the garbage of the world,' speaks optimistically for the nation" (42). Perhaps not for the entire nation. In a scene that occurs, tellingly, after Skeeter guides Harry to a recognition of his murderous hatred of the Penn Park caste, Jill asks Harry when he plans on kicking out Skeeter, stating that she is scared "'of you and him together'" (Redux 218). Updike implies here that when hostility ceases between whites and blacks of the lower classes, their concerted attention just might turn toward their shared upper-class adversary, an idea given credence by a comparison of pre- and post-education Harry. Before Janice admits her affair, she tells Harry that Stavros is smart enough to have gone to college, and would have had he not been a Greek. In reply, Harry sarcastically asks, "'Oh. Don't they let Greeks in now? The nigger quota too big?'" (65). With this exchange, Updike calls attention to how poor ethnics and African Americans compete for space on college campuses, a competition that stirs race-based intra-class animosity. Later in the novel, after Jill's death and the cessation of the teach-ins, Harry's skill set becomes obsolete and he is fired. His boss, Pajasek, tells Harry that he has to let him go instead of a black such as Buchanan because "'Christ, let him go we'd have every do-good outfit in the city on our necks, it's not the way I'd do things'" (297). Instead of rising to the bait and railing against blacks and his own status within an unprotected and persecuted demographic, Harry quietly accepts his termination. Ristoff argues that Harry's refusal to express resentment toward Buchanan might lead us to think that he has outgrown his racism, but he asserts that "The new predicament is more the result of political space which has been conquered by blacks than a result of a fundamental change in [his] attitude towards blacks" (102). Ristoff's own conception of the zero sum political playing field suggests, however, that Civil Rights progress has come at the expense of working class whites; African Americans certainly did not gain ground ceded by the wealthy white power structure. It stands to reason, then, that a pre-educated Harry would indeed have resented Buchanan, and would probably have made a crack to Pajasek about Verity Press's "nigger quota."

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But he refused to do that. And while it is too much of an insulting overstatement, in my opinion, to state that Harry Angstrom became black (for however short a period of time), he did make progress toward growing out of his bigotry, incremental progress that Updike indicates in key scenes. For example, during the third section when the four members of the household cram into Jill's Porsche and drive out to the country, it breaks down and Skeeter's fugitive status causes him to panic. His initial thought is that he has been set-up and is about to be arrested. Harry seems hurt that "after all these nights together" Skeeter would jump to such a conclusion, but when he views the situation from his broadened historical perspective and thinks about Skeeter's fear of betrayal, he concludes, "Maybe natural, three hundred years of it." With this fear of betrayal in mind, the author notes that for Harry, "Skeeter has become a duty" (234). Updike concludes the scene with another indication of Harry's evolving perspective on race. After the tow truck driver drops off the four of them at the house, he warns Harry that "'Jigaboos'" will "'knife you in the back every time.'" Harry does not reply, and Updike states that his protagonist feels "embarrassed for" the driver (236). This reaction suggests that as more tolerant and educated thoughts crowd in on the fear in his mind, Harry becomes increasingly alienated from the white working class perspective on race that Updike portrays as typical. As the education of Harry Angstrom continues, Updike seems to delight in the role that marijuana plays in opening his protagonist's mind: "Rabbit drags on his own joint, and feels his world expand to admit new truths as a woman spreads her legs, as a flower unfolds, as the stars flee one another" (241). Despite the pleasure of drugs and images of sex, flowers, and astronomy, the new truths Harry admits into his broadening mind horrify him. After reading aloud passages from the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass that include depictions of slaves forced to live in wretched living conditions, sadistic masters who delight in cruel whippings, and the decadence of indolent wealth (241-46), Harry can no longer escape the abysmal depths of history: "The book he has read aloud torments him with a vision of bottomless squalor, of dead generations, of buried tortures and lost reasons" (247). Updike implies that Harry has left off the lid and is finally forcing himself to look into the cesspool of history. And as he did with the car trouble scene, Updike follows one of Harry's realizations, a stage on his worldview's evolutionary journey, with an encounter with prejudice to show the extent to which he protagonist's point of view has changed. The encounter comes the next day when Harry walks home from the bus stop after work. Two of his neighbors, Mahlon Showalter and Eddie Brumbach, accost him beside a significantly painted red-white-and-blue mailbox. Updike describes Showalter as a plump man, aged forty to fifty, who wears a and deals in computers. Brumbach, unlike Showalter, does not present Harry with a business card. Updike depicts him as younger than Harry and military in posture, demeanor, and haircut. The dent in his face and red scar, where part of his jawbone was removed, verifies the authenticity of his comportment. Brumbach is a Vietnam veteran who now works in a steel plant. In what I read as a microcosm of the Hardhat Riot that will occur the following spring in New York, Updike uses the two men to represent an alliance of white and blue collar workers, a businessman and a soldier/laborer, with a socially conservative agenda6. Their mission is not support for the war in Vietnam, however. They tell Harry that they want to talk about the stories kids in the neighborhood have been telling them "'about what they see in your

6 The Hardhat Riots occurred during the first week of May 1970, early in Updike's writing process. Updike states in his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom that he began writing Redux on 7 February 1970, finished the first draft on 11 December, and had it typed up by Palm Sunday 1971 (xv).

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windows'" (249). The crux of the matter, they tell Harry in crude terms, is the presence of Skeeter with Jill in the house. As Brumbach puts it, "'My younger boy came home the other day and said he saw them screwing right on the downstairs rug'" (250). With this scene, Updike further explores sexualized racism, a theme that recurs throughout the novel. The scene illustrates the extent to which Harry has outgrown the narrowness of the racial perspectives of men such as these and the tow truck driver. Harry stands up for his right of privacy and tells both men that Skeeter "'goes when he stops being my guest'" (252). Brumbach makes a few threats, and tells Harry that he "'better fucking barricade'" his house and that he has "'been warned.'" Despite these hostile gestures, Harry finds himself liking Brumbach because "he likes anybody who fought in Vietnam where he himself should have been fighting, had he not been too old, too old and fat and cowardly" (252-53). I read Harry as recognizing in the former solider the "angry old patriotism" that his houseguests have been working to educate out of him; his leaning on the patriotic mailbox certainly makes such an implication. Updike leaves it to the reader to imagine how Harry, earlier in the novel, would have felt about a neighbor of his creating a social situation that flouts the mores of the traditional, Middle American life he himself had grudgingly embraced nearly a decade earlier. One imagines, though, that Harry's thoughts would have been a mixture of tolerance and fear, with fear predominating. Now, toward the end of the novel, it is clear that Harry, despite his lingering biases and blind spots on the racial issue, does not have the same hang-up about interracial sex as many other characters, especially white, working-class characters, in the book.

Sexualized Racism and Updike's Self Sabotage Updike introduces this incendiary topic early in the story via, appropriately enough, the television. Before Harry has confronted Janice about her affair, he and Nelson watch a skit on the Carol Burnett show about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. This reminds Harry of his youth, when he would take a break from such games as kick-the-can to listen to the Lone Ranger radio program three days a week while eating peanut butter and crackers. Harry does not make the explicit connection that the sketch indirectly parodies the wholesome Americana of his youth when God dreamed America, that the time he and other such Middle Americans revere as sacrosanct has become the target of ridicule in the midst of the cultural ferment of the late 1960s. The skit does get Harry to thinking how little he understands about Tonto, though. With political buzzwords of the present in mind, Harry places himself back in front of the radio and thinks:

The Lone Ranger is a white man, so law and order on the range will work to his benefit, but what about Tonto? A Judas to his race, the more disinterested and lonely and heroic figure of virtue. When did he get his pay-off? Why was he faithful to the masked stranger? In the days of the war one never asked. Tonto was simply on "the side of right." It seemed a correct dream then, red and white together, red loving white as naturally as stripes in the flag. Where has "the side of right" gone? (20)

Here Updike illustrates again that two strains of thought are working in Harry's mind. On one side, the side that stems from an open mind, Harry wonders about the Native American's perspective, about why Tonto would be loyal to a masked man who belongs to a people who have caused his ancestors so much suffering. To this part of his mind, Tonto is no mere sidekick; he is a person about whom he would like to know more. The other side of Harry's mind longs for the certainty of the early Forties, when "in the days of the war one never asked." This is the

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unwavering certitude that Harry insists on exhibiting in late 1969, his contemporary time of war. When arguing with Stavros and others who stand against the Vietnam War, he finds himself wondering where "the side of right" has gone; he is made uneasy by any lack of surety that America is on the side of the angels, that white makes right. Intermixed with these issues is that of interracial insinuations and double entendres. Carol Burnett plays the Lone Ranger's wife, who complains in the send-up that although they have had Tonto to their home several times for dinner, he has never reciprocated. Tonto explains to her that if she were to come to his teepee, "she would be kidnapped by seven or eight braves" (20). The character Burnett plays is more than interested in this scenario, and the sketch concludes with Tonto and her kissing and hugging as she confides to the audience that she has "'always been interested in Indian affairs'" (21). Interestingly, the man who plays Tonto is black, but Harry does not remember his name, and Updike only describes him parenthetically as "not Sammy Davis Jr. but another TV Negro." Thus on television there is a black man playing a Native American man about to sleep with not just any white woman, but the wife of a white American hero. Harry thinks this final joke falls somewhat flat, not because of his unease with what it suggests, but because, as Updike puts it, "everybody still thinks of Tonto as incorruptible" (21). Harry needs Tonto to be unwaveringly on the side of right because he longs for the certitude of his youth. The notion of interracial sex in the sketch does not seem to worry Harry, but Updike does pointedly highlight the way in which it functions as part of a sketch that lampoons the clarity, the stark divisions, of the time for which Harry expresses nostalgia: right was right and wrong was wrong with no gray areas in between, and the races interacted but did not, to his limited knowledge, commonly intermix. The white and red stripes on the flag Harry references in his mind are aligned, but they do not commingle. And while Harry might not fret over the sexual implications of the sketch, one can imagine how men such as Showalter, Brumbach, and Earl Angstrom would have reacted to it. Earl, for his part, expresses to Harry his displeasure with the fact that he has taken Skeeter into his home. Earl pays lip service to tolerance with the inherently ironic disclaimer that he is "'no nigger-hater'" before launching into a diatribe about how "'they don't have any feeling of obligation'" and "'they're not ethical like white men and there's no use saying they are'" (206- 07). This scene takes place before Harry's run-in with Showalter and Brumbach, and Earl, after Harry tells him that he does not even know his neighbors, prophetically responds that "'you'll get to know them.'" Earl explains that "'the people of this county'" are "'good natured people'" who enjoy food, drink, red-light districts and playing the numbers, "'but they don't like seeing their women desecrated.'" And he stresses, in response to Harry's asking who is being desecrated, "'Just that menagerie over there, the way you're keeping it, is a desecration'" (207). Thus we see here that Earl has more in common with Showalter and Brumbach than Harry does. Harry is, of course, staunchly Middle American, especially when it comes to issues such as the Vietnam War, but the mere fact that he lets Jill and Skeeter stay in his home indicates an openness to new experiences that these other men and, probably, most of the folks in nearby Millersburg, Pennsylvania, do not share. They certainly would not stay up nights smoking pot and talking about the history of the United States, especially slavery and its record of institutionalized rape. That Updike stresses the sexual components of racism, from the past violations of slaves by white slave masters to contemporary white hysteria over interracial sex, is laudable. However, the author himself ultimately falls back on, and thereby reinforces, the very stereotypes he seeks to undermine via Harry's education. Updike also makes suspect insinuations via the teach-in scenes and Harry's debates with

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Skeeter. The Theodore Parker speech that Jill reads contains passages that the abolitionist has written from the point of view of a slave master who admits: "'I stole the father, stole also the sons, and set them to toil; his wife and daughters are a pleasant spoil to me. Behold the children also of thy servant and his handmaidens – sons swarthier than their sire'" (211-12). Later, Updike picks up in midstream a conversation between Harry and Skeeter. Harry counters an assertion of Skeeter's, an assertion that Updike does not convey to the reader, with the delicate retort, "'But it is. Everybody knows black pussy is beautiful. It's on posters even, now'" (217). Skeeter counters by asking Harry how he thinks "'all this mammy shit got started? Who you think put all those hog-fat churchified old women at the age of thirty in Harlem?'" Harry rejects responsibility for this development, but Skeeter, just as he claimed earlier that Harry was responsible for the Compromise of 1876, argues, "'It was you. Man, you is just who it was. From those breeding cabins on you made the black girl feel sex was shit, so she hid from it as quick as she could in the mammy bit, right?'" Skeeter makes the point to Harry, who wants him to tell black women that sex is not shit, that they do not believe him because "'They see I don't count. I have no muscle, right? I can't protect my black women, right? 'Cause you don't let me be a man.'" Harry tells him to "'Go ahead. Be one.'" And with that Skeeter kisses Jill and asks Harry how he likes it. Harry states evenly that he does not mind "'if she doesn't'" (217-18). Here Updike implies that African American men pursue white women in order to assert the masculinity that the institution of slavery robbed from them. This sexualized revenge scenario counteracts the noble intentions of the teach-in scenes, and by impugning the motives of the men Skeeter represents, Updike reinforces some of the worst fears and prejudices of men such as Showalter, Brumbach, and Earl. The novel offers no indication that Harry is insincere when he states that he does not mind Skeeter and Jill having a physical relationship. Indeed, when he finds out from Brumbach that the two had been "screwing" on the living room floor, he gets angry that people look in his windows, but he never brings up the sex to either of his houseguests. Harry's relaxed attitude toward interracial intercourse should not be mistaken for enlightenment, though. Just as he studied, on the bus, the way in which the "strange race" was put together, Skeeter's corporeal qualities captivate Harry: "Physically, Skeeter fascinates Rabbit." He marvels at "the peculiar glinting luster of his skin," "the curious greased grace of his gestures," and objectifies him by concluding that "Skeeter in his house feels like a finely made electric toy; Harry wants to touch him but is afraid he will get a shock" (218). Markle points out that that in Redux Updike continually associates blacks with sex and takes note of Harry's physical attraction to Skeeter. Updike juxtaposes Skeeter's black body with Harry's whiteness, echoing Eldridge Cleaver's theory that whites have become sterile, even bodiless, intellect while blacks, removed from the industrial revolution, remain fertile, sexual, and physical (155-57). On the bus, Harry's use of terms such as "Nature," "tropical," and "Lions" in reference to African Americans lends credence to this reading. Markle states that within this racial imagining, Skeeter plays the role of Harry's "vitalizer" (149). Robinson also reads in this "electric toy" passage Harry's barely repressed sexual desire for Skeeter. However, rather than reading Harry as lacking physicality, she underscores his body, relating it to her main argument about the burgeoning visibility of whiteness and stressing that compared to Skeeter's physicality, Harry's embodied whiteness is shown to be unappealing and, more importantly, in decline (344-45). I read in Harry's fascination with Skeeter his obvious unfamiliarity with African Americans, which accounts for his reliance on words such as "strange," or his fear, however loosely held, that touching Skeeter will shock him. This is precisely the kind of obliviousness that should be eradicated, but ultimately is not, by the education Updike models in his teach-in scenes.

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Harry's gross ignorance causes him to rely on sexual stereotypes of blacks. At home, long before Skeeter's arrival, he watches a game show with young couples on it, presumably The Newlywed Game. Harry's thoughts on seeing an African American couple on the show reflect the dual between tolerance and fear that defines his mind: "That's O.K., let 'em guess, win, and shriek with the rest of us. Better that than sniping from rooftops" (15). This quotation indicates the starkly dichotomous way that Harry thinks about race: blacks can either join with whites in worshipping consumer goods or they can engage in riots. The contestants' physicality also fascinates Harry, and he finds himself spiraling from curiosity, to fantasy, to sexual insecurity, before landing on defensive jingoism:

Still, he wonders how that black bride would be. Big lips, suck you right off, the men as slow as Jesus, long as whips, takes everything to get them up, in there forever, that's why white women need them, white men too quick about it, have to get on with the job, making America great. (15)

We see in this passage that Harry has the same lust for black women that the slave masters Skeeter and Jill would eventually teach him about had. We also see that he has the same conception of black men's sexual prowess that seems to terrify Showalter, Brumbach, and Earl. However, whereas Showalter, Brumbach, and to a lesser extent, Earl, rely on threats to assuage their own insecurities, Harry falls back on the patriotic supposition that white American men have been too busy building the greatest country on earth to take the time to make love properly. This is an interesting claim, and even if Updike presents it in jest, the author does put forth the argument that Middle America's preoccupation with interracial sex stems from a mixture of lustful fascination and insecurity. He returns to the idea when Harry sits with Buchanan and the others in Jimbo's, where he thinks to himself that "Black men have more, bigger. Cocks like eels. Night feeders" (115). These thoughts coexist in his mind with his sexual interest in Babe, an interest he ultimately does not pursue, perhaps because he is sexually intimidated. Clausen makes the astute point that "Harry's interactions with African-Americans are dominated by his fantasies and stereotypical projections. This is surely psychologically accurate; the problem comes, however, in Updike's failure to present any alternative reference points" (47). I think my point is similar to hers. Updike fails to offer a viable point of view of this subject that differs from Harry's, and he consistently undermines the credibility of his educators, Jill and Skeeter, the characters he designed to guide Harry toward a more enlightened view of race relations. And although Harry's stance on the war softens some by the end of the story, Updike actually reinforces and validates his main character's sexualized racism. Harry's education, and the novel's exploration of sexualized racism, culminates near the end of the third part, after Jill has once again become a junkie. Skeeter supplies her habit, a development I will discuss in some detail below, and he uses this leverage to degrade her. During what turns out to be the household's last night together, Harry sends Nelson upstairs, declaring it "'a grown-up evening,'" and Jill soon thereafter tells Skeeter that she is "'in need,'" meaning she needs a fix (256-57). For this Skeeter forces Jill into a performance for "'The Man.'" Skeeter asks Harry, who has been lubricated by a beer and a joint, if he likes being "'a nigger.'" He replies that he does, and at Skeeter's prompting he further agrees that he wants to be "a good nigger" (258). Encouraged, Skeeter launches into a game of racial role reversal, telling Harry "'You is a big black man sittin' right there. You is chained to that chair. And I, I is white as snow. Be-hold.'" After stripping down to his , he approaches Jill and declares her "'black as coal. An

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ebony virgin torn from the valley of the river Niger.'" As if she were on an auctioning block, Skeeter has her display her teeth and her "'rump,'" before having her perform, as he puts it in the voice of an auctioneer, "'a demon-stray-shun of o-bee-deeyance, from this little coal-black lady, who has been broken in by expert traders working out of Nashville, Tennessee, and who is guaranteed by them ab-so-lutily to give no trouble in the kitchen, hallway, stable or bedroom!'" And with this, Jill fellates Skeeter as Harry watches (258). As Clausen notes, this scene, even if taken as allegory and even if Skeeter's affected dialect is meant to be taken as parody, "is hideously painful in a way the author fails to notice" (47). This disturbing scene epitomizes how confused Updike's argument ultimately is. Clearly, Updike here intends to take Harry into the final phase of his education, a play, of sorts, that enables him to empathize with a fettered slave who is emasculated by his being prevented from protecting one of "his" women. This would seem to be the point, as Markle and Updike put it above, where Harry becomes black. Reread this way, the scene marks the end of a progression for Harry that starts with his dismissal of America's racial history as bleeding-heart stuff, advances into sympathy for Skeeter's paranoia and embarrassment for crude bigots, and finishes in his living room, bound to a chair by imaginary chains, a pretend black man watching the desecration of one of his women. Yet Updike very clearly shows that Harry does not have his mind opened to what it would be like, as Skeeter puts it in a previous scene, not to count, to have no muscle, to be unable to protect his women, to be prevented from being a man. Instead, he watches Skeeter and Jill and gets a voyeuristic thrill. Here Updike veers perilously close to suggesting that male slaves were turned on by slave masters violating slave women, and his reckless self-indulgence enables him to bask in the kind of sexual exploitation he has been scrutinizing. Harry, his alter ego, gets caught up in the moment, and imaginary fetters be damned, he turns on the lamp to get a better view (259). When he does, he sees a face looking in his window, and the next night two men who are never identified, but the reader is left thinking that they are Showalter and Brumbach, burn down his home. By literally shedding light upon this interracial sex, which he not only permits but tacitly encourages, Harry further flouts the mores of his Middle American neighborhood and likely invites the wrath of Showalter and Brumbach. But instead of recognizing how Harry's education has enabled him to progress beyond such violent prejudice, the reader is left wondering why Updike, in an attempt to model a means of educating Middle America, would reinforce their worst racial fears. The auctioneer scene, instead of being the crowning moment in the education of Harry Angstrom, shows an African American male who has used drugs to enslave and sexually exploit a young white girl. This is more damning than anything a conservative Southern Strategist could have conveyed via coded language and insinuations, and it leaves the reader wondering what this staged scenario was supposed to have taught Harry. Expanding the scope of this discussion from this particular scene to the novel as a whole, we see that Updike seriously undermines his polemic by his characterization of Jill and Skeeter. In the novel's allegory, Harry stands in for Middle America, Jill represents the young rich white hippies, and Skeeter reflects the militant blacks, of the era. Updike's characterization of Jill leads one to the conclusion that his ultimate take on the hippies is that they wanted the world to run on love rather than fear because they were afraid and inadequately loved by their wealthy but emotionally distant parents. Jill's vision of a better world reflected what she needed but never got as a child. As a result, she does not function well as a catalyst to change the worldview of Middle America. Instead, Middle America is left pitying Jill as a sad and tragic character, and can thus

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dismiss out of hand the changes she advocates. After the fire, Updike transitions Middle America from the position of judged to judgers. After meeting with Harry and Jill's mother, the chief of police says to the former about the latter: "'Rich bitch, if she'd given the girl half a reason to stay home she'd be alive today'" (303). This sentiment echoes that of the woman in the Newsweek article, "The Square American Speaks Out," who argues that hippies are the result of "mothers [who] are too busy at cocktail parties and bridge clubs to be mothers" (Fleming 51). Through the chief of police, a grown-up maintaining order right out of the author's Shillington childhood, Updike ensures that Middle America has the last word on Jill. And if Updike undermines his suggestion that the Middle American Harry Angstrom has anything to learn from a hippie and black militant by depicting Jill as a callow little-girl-lost, then he completely collapses it by drawing Skeeter as a callous madman with a messiah complex who hooks Jill on heroin and leaves her to burn in a fire. Skeeter announces upon his arrival at Harry's house that he is "'the real Jesus. I am the black Jesus, right? There is none other, no'" (Redux 182). With this idea of there being "none other" in mind, Skeeter warns Harry a few days later that "'By many false prophets, you shall know my coming,'" and that he, in his capacity as the Lord, planned to "'fry'" Harry and Nixon's asses (196). Later still, he declares himself "'the Christ of the new Dark Age'" (241). This notion of a new Dark Age provides a window into the logic of Skeeter's cosmology, which I read as stemming from his time in Vietnam. From my perspective, the war traumatized Skeeter, as evidenced by his response to Harry's asking him how he got through his tour without being hurt. Although he was not physically injured, Skeeter states simply, "'I was hurt'" (230). This declaration of vulnerability serves as a culmination of Skeeter's long description of his tour. Updike interweaves Skeeter's spiritual declarations with strong indications that his experiences were more than he could psychologically handle. He begins his first burst of remembrances with the religiously ominous "'It was where it was coming to an end'" and concludes it by admitting how confusing most of his "'recon action'" was, that he could not comprehend everything that happened to him: "'It was very complicated, there isn't any net to grab it all in'" (224). As he continues, he states flatly that "'The holy quality is hardest to get,'" and then slides into a recollection of accidentally stepping on the insides of a fellow soldier who was lying in the dark "'with his guts spilled out. I couldn't see him, hustling my ass back from the perimeter, I stepped on his insides, felt like stepping on a piece of Jell-O, worse, he screamed out and died right then, he hadn't been dead to then'" (226). After recalling another similarly horrific incident, Skeeter states that "'I wouldn't have believed you could see such bad things and keep your eyeballs'" (226-27). This line indicates the impact the horror Skeeter witnessed has had upon him, which is buttressed by his claim that he would "'give one ball'" to be able to forget it (226). The next night, while talking again about Vietnam, Skeeter puts forth his view of the universe. He explains that although the universe is expanding outward, "'it does not thin out to next to nothingness on account of the reason that through strange holes in this nothingness new somethingness comes pouring in from exactly nowhere'." Vietnam is, according to Skeeter, "'the local hole. It is where the world is redoing itself. […] It is the end. It is the beginning. It is beautiful, men do beautiful things in that mud. It is where God is pushing through'" (228). He further explains that "'Nam the spot where our heavenly essence is pustulatin'" (230). I read Updike as implying that Skeeter uses these religious beliefs to make sense of an unfathomable situation. According to my interpretation, an important part of Skeeter's self-preservation was to

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superimpose divine will on an inherently chaotic situation. A few nights later, when he is back in his Messiah mode, Skeeter rejects the idea, posited by Harry, that he is full of hate:

"I am by no means full of hate. I am full of love, which is a dynamic force. Hate freezes. Love strikes and liberates. Right? Jesus liberated the money-changers from the temple. The new Jesus will liberate the new money-changers. The old Jesus brought a sword, right? The new Jesus will also bring a sword. He will be a living flame of love. Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains." (239)

To persevere in Vietnam, Skeeter rejected the notion that war is hell and chose instead to see the face of God. Put differently, Skeeter deified chaos. As a survival mechanism, it served him well. However, by carrying those same techniques into civilian life with him, Skeeter comes across as a raving mad man. However sympathetic his war recollections make him, his cosmology undermines the role he plays in the novel as the Middle American Harry's educator. Marshall Boswell, in his detailed and fascinating "The Black Jesus: Racism and Redemption in John Updike's Rabbit Redux," offers a unique perspective on Updike's treatment of matters racial and theological. Boswell overlooks Skeeter's trauma and claims that "any exploration of the novel's treatment of race is incomplete insofar as it ignores Updike's overarching theological concerns" (100). With that in mind he outlines the ideas of theologian Karl Barth and their influence on Updike's work, and focuses on the idea of a God that made the world from nothing and remains a wholly other God completely separated from, and refusing to intervene in, its creation (103). Via his "tricky dialectal method," Updike's Barthian God is simultaneously "the angel of light and life" and "the angel of death" (104-05). Boswell contends that critics who view Skeeter only as an antichrist fail to appreciate both the novels theological underpinnings and Updike's dialectical methodology (116). He credits Markle for treating Skeeter as the Christ figure he says he is, and cites an Updike interview where the author states surprise that no critics take the character at his word (114). To Boswell, Skeeter "is not an antichrist at all, but rather the messiah of the novel's God of Nothingness;" Skeeter is, he adds, "'the messiah of chaos'" (114). Although I admire Boswell's essay, I remain skeptical of how literally, even within the logic of the novel, we should read Skeeter's claim to be the new Christ. My reading focuses on Skeeter's didactic function and on how Updike undermines his validity as Harry's educator. The reader may first accept Skeeter in the capacity of teacher because he is knowledgeable and points his pupil toward authoritative passages, including some about sexualized racism. However, Updike calls attention away from these excerpts and toward Skeeter's madness and sexual aggression. The most glaring example of this occurs after Skeeter has had Harry read a long passage from the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. As Douglass, through Harry's voice, recounts standing up to, and refusing to be flogged by, a viciously tyrannical slave-driver, Skeeter loses control of himself, strips naked, and masturbates. Boswell points to the scene as a moment of "clear solidarity" between Skeeter and Harry (121), but he too conveniently leaves out Skeeter's enthusiastic self-gratification. As if calling attention away from Frederick Douglass' prose were not bad enough, Updike describes Skeeter as "Long as an eel, feeding" (246). Harry, you will recall, had been carrying in his mind broad sexual stereotypes about blacks, including his belief that black men had "Cocks like eels. Night feeders." Updike confirms in the mind of Harry and white Middle America this stereotype while presenting to the reader an image of a wild black man who cannot sexually control himself. Updike works at cross-purposes by

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simultaneously arguing, on the one hand, that Middle Americans such as Harry Angstrom rely on stereotypes in their racial thinking due to ignorance and then, on the other, reinforcing these same stereotypes. Updike indulges in the kind of sexual stereotyping he set out to critique. This is a devastating contradiction in the logic of the novel, but it is not nearly as bad as how the author handles the relationship between Skeeter and Jill. Updike presents plenty of working class white males who fret over the fact that pretty, blonde Jill lives under the same roof as Skeeter, and he depicts Harry as laudable for his indifference to the pair's physical relationship and for the way that he defends his living arrangement against hostile interrogators. The author suggests that Harry Angstrom should be read as an example of the way that racial fears and sexual anxiety can be assuaged with some history lessons and plenty of weed. Harry's father Earl comes across as living in another century with his use of the term "desecration," and Showalter and Brumbach read like sheetless Klansmen ready and willing to destroy a piece of the neighborhood in order to save it. Even the police chief, questioning Harry on the night of the arson, demands to know if "'the black'" was having "'sexual relations with the girl'" while working under the presupposition that Skeeter set the fire (285). In short, each man assumed that Jill would be degraded or worse by her relationship with Skeeter. And while Updike nudges the reader to take Harry's more enlightened position on the matter, he ultimately shows that these characters' worst fears are well-grounded. In other words, Updike contradicts himself and once again undermines his overarching argument. Updike indicates that Skeeter has nefarious intentions toward Jill at the end of his long Vietnam recollection. She begs him to stop talking about it, and Updike notes that "This afternoon he got her to drop some mescaline. If she'll eat mesc, she'll snort smack. If she'll snort, she'll shoot. He has her" (230). The reader learns that Skeeter's plan has worked when Nelson, worried about Jill, confides to Harry that Skeeter "'gives her things'" (254). This realization occurs immediately after Harry's run-in with Showalter and Brumbach and a few hours before Skeeter plays the auctioneer to Harry's bound slave and Jill's Nigerian virgin. After the face in the window stops their performance short, Skeeter makes Jill call him her "'Lord Jesus'" and Savior, and he forces her to say that she loves him "'much more'" than she loves herself (260-61). One could easily sum up the situation by stating that Skeeter desecrates Jill. Updike does not explain the African American character's motive for doing this, and of course Skeeter's actions buttress white, working-class fears of the effect of black men on white girls. That these actions occur while Harry broadens his historical horizon contradicts what seems to be Updike's main idea about Middle America, education, and tolerance. Boswell acknowledges that Skeeter's deliberate attempt to re-addict Jill to heroine is one of the "most disturbing plot developments" of the novel (125). He also grants that his actions are "despicable," but states that they "serve to illuminate further the novel's theopolitical vision." Boswell reads the heroin as "the 'blood to wash away' the sins of white America" and Skeeter's successful mission to hook Jill as "merely returning white America's sin to its original source" (125). Although Skeeter is a Christ figure, "he transfers the task of martyrdom to Jill, the same way he transfers to her the burden of 'white' sin" (126). Via the fire, from which she cannot escape presumably because of her heroin stupor, Jill becomes the sacrificial lamb of the novel (127). Boswell expands on this point:

through her heroin addiction she carries within her the "blood" of white America's racial sins. When Skeeter's God of chaos strikes Rabbit's house, Jill is there to serve as the

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white race's crucified martyr; with her death, she assumes the burden of white sin, represented here by heroin-contaminated blood. (128)

I agree that Jill serves as a sacrificial lamb, but only insofar as the author needs her death to act as a counterpoint to Rebecca June's drowning in Rabbit, Run. And I certainly cede the point that Updike plays with Christ imagery when drawing Skeeter. For example, when Skeeter takes off his , Harry "has never seen such a chest except on a crucifix" (243); over the radio, the police chief uses the code "'double Easter'" to spell Skeeter's name (286); and in a continuation of this second coming insinuation, Harry drops off Skeeter near a sign that reads "Galilee 2" (292). Nevertheless, the act of self-sacrifice, martyrdom, defines a character as a Christ figure. To pass along this act to another is anathema to the entire idea. The moment Skeeter fled the flames, he gave up any rights he had to the Jesus title. Updike not only subverts his own Christ references, he further sabotages the racial progress he sought to make from the teach-in scenes. When Harry asks him why he failed to get Jill out of the house, Skeeter flippantly replies that he "'was in no shape to take care of some whitey woman, let Whitey take care of his own'" (290). Upset, Harry steers this, their last conversation, back to essentially the same question, and Skeeter makes a mockery of their educational sessions, "'Man, you want to talk guilt, we got to go back hundreds of years.'" Harry replies that he was not around then, but Skeeter was in the house the night before, which leads Skeeter to state weakly that he "'was severely disadvantaged'" (291). Harry had suggested, when their seminars first started, that Skeeter was using history as a crutch. As they progressed, he evolved out of that point of view and came to contextualize and sympathize with such things as Skeeter's paranoia and fear of betrayal. That Skeeter uses the very history he taught Harry as a pathetic excuse not to rescue the woman he befouled with drugs and violated for sport ultimately eclipses the point Updike makes about history and tolerance. The author ends up suggesting that the pre-educated version of Harry was right all along, that Skeeter uses history as a convenient excuse to explain away his failures, and thereby reinforces the very Middle American prejudices he sought to undercut. Finally, in an exchange that perhaps exemplifies the tone of all of the Rabbit novels, Skeeter asks Harry if Nelson is broken up about Jill's death. Harry confirms that his son is indeed shattered, and Skeeter replies, "'Tell him, there's a ton of cunt in the world'" (292). If the reader can look past how startlingly crass that line is, it might leave him or her wondering how great a sacrifice Jill was if she was merely one of a ton. Jesus is said to have atoned for the sins of all of humanity, after all, because he was God's only begotten son. Could such an apparently disposable character as Jill really absolve White America of all its transgressions? Ultimately, Rabbit Redux stands as one author's perception of Middle America's reaction to the social upheaval of the 1960s. Updike covers an immense amount of ground, from the moon landing to urban riots, from changing mores to the Vietnam War. He presents characters that serve as literal representations of key demographics in the changing cultural and political landscape. And while his intention seems to have been to argue that Middle America will become more tolerant and progressive as its understanding of America, specifically its history and place in the world, becomes more grounded in an educated reality, Updike ultimately reinforces the fears he set out to undermine and provides his readers with rationales for rejecting the social changes of the 1960s and refusing to reconsider their social conservatism. And what about the Vietnam War and the protests it generated, which were the very reason John Updike brought back Harry Angstrom in the first place? Living at his parents' house

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after the fire, Harry explains to his sister, Mim, that he is still for the war, but only because everybody else is against it. Harry explains that he sees the conflict as "'a kind of head fake,'" as a strategy "'to keep the other guy off balance'" (310). Harry now argues for the war from a pragmatic, rather than from an idealistically Divine Right, perspective. He also tells Mim that he "'learned some things,'" and briefly describes how he, Jill, and Skeeter would stay up nights reading history books about slavery to one another. When she prompts him, Harry tells his sister that he learned that "'this country isn't perfect.'" Updike tellingly adds that "Even as he says this he realizes he doesn't believe it, any more than he believes at heart that he will die" (311). In other words, there remains in Harry a core conflict, one more among many, between what he knows and what he believes. If he were to accept what he has come to learn, he would have to abandon the America of his childhood, the America dreamed by God. Harry will never allow himself to believe what he has learned about his country for fear of losing the most vulnerable part of himself, the core of his being. As Updike continues Harry's story into the 1990s, we readers find out that Harry liked Ronald Reagan and voted for George H. W. Bush in 1988 (Rabbit at Rest 54). Thus Harry not only represents Middle America at the end of the 1960s; he exemplifies how members of the Silent Majority became Reagan Democrats. Via Harry Angstrom, John Updike dramatizes how the Social Issue, and a refusal to accept the truth of America's racial and imperialistic history, facilitated the exodus of the white working class from the Democratic New Deal Coalition to the conservative movement's New Republican Majority. By undermining his own attempt to educate Middle America, Updike helped to lead the way.

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CHAPTER THREE: ROUGH JUSTICE

Tricky Dick and Dirty Harry Dirty Harry, produced and directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, who also owns the production company behind the film, came out during the Christmas season of 1971. The picture's subject matter and tone suggest that the filmmakers saw in the Nixon constituency an audience who would welcome the story of a ruggedly individualistic police hero standing strong against urban violence, permissive sleaze, murderous hippies, impractical bureaucrats, and a liberal judiciary that puts the rights of criminals ahead of the safety of law-abiding citizens. Dirty Harry opens with a shot of a marble wall with the inscription "IN TRIBUTE TO THE POLICE OFFICERS OF SAN FRANCISCO WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE LINE OF DUTY," and a badge that reads "SAN FRANCISCO POLICE" then glides over the names of the fallen officers. Talk about telegraphing your punch. This is not an ambiguous movie; it functions as a morality tale for the law and order crowd, for those Middle Americans who feel their country has been betrayed by the liberal forces against whom Inspector Harry Callahan battles. Dirty Harry's socially conservative take on criminality and its description of Great Society liberalism as elitist, out of touch, and ultimately dangerous combine to ensure its importance as an emblem of the coalescence of conservative rhetoric and popular culture. After honoring law enforcement officials, Siegel fades into a close-up of the business end of a high-powered sniper rifle. The maniac wielding the weapon shoots a young woman enjoying a swim in a nearby rooftop swimming pool. The perpetrator, Scorpio, who is listed in the end credits only as "Killer," leaves a note for the police. His name and note both allude to the real Zodiac Killer, who was terrorizing Northern California at the time of the movie's release. In his note, Scorpio threatens to kill a person a day unless the city of San Francisco pays him one hundred thousand dollars. He follows through on his threat by killing a young boy, and he raises the stakes when he kidnaps a teenage girl and buries her alive. In exchange for her whereabouts, Scorpio demands two hundred thousand dollars. Callahan delivers the money to Scorpio, who double-crosses him and decides to let his victim suffocate. Scorpio escapes, but not before Callahan stabs him in the leg during their struggle. This wound enables Callahan to find the doctor who patched up the villain. The doctor explains where Scorpio lives, and with time running out for the buried girl, Callahan enters the criminal's residence without a warrant. Scorpio flees, and Callahan carefully shoots him without killing him. Callahan then tortures Scorpio until he gives up his victim's location. These actions are ultimately to no avail, and the next shot is of the girl's naked corpse being pulled from her tomb. The next scene takes place in the District's Attorney's office, where Callahan is berated for violating Scorpio's constitutional rights. Worse, Scorpio is going to be released as soon as he is well enough to leave the hospital because the evidence against him cannot be used in a trial due to the illegal means by which Callahan attained it. Despite being told to leave Scorpio alone, Callahan goes rogue and tails him. Scorpio notices this surveillance and hires a man to beat him (Scorpio) to a bloody pulp. He then goes to the media and states that he was the victim of police brutality on the part of Callahan. With Callahan off his back, Scorpio gets a gun and highjacks a school bus full of children. For ransom, he demands two hundred thousand dollars and a jet airplane to take him out of the country. Callahan refuses when the Mayor and Police Chief ask him to deliver the money. On his own, he waits atop an overpass for the bus to pass underneath. He jumps on the bus, forces it to crash, and chases down Scorpio for their final confrontation. After shooting Scorpio dead, Callahan hurls his badge into the water with the criminal's floating

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corpse. Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan, as portrayed by Clint Eastwood, embodies the police officer as working-class hero. Davis W. Houck points out that when Steve, an intern who banters with Harry while stitching him up, remarks that "We Portrero Hill boys, we gotta stick together," the audience gets a glimpse into Callahan's blue-collar background. Houck stresses that "This is not a throwaway line; it gives us something of Harry's class origins. Perhaps predictably, Harry is from a working-class part of the city" (73). His modest origins and hardboiled realism result in an attitude that makes no task, no matter how unsavory, beneath him. Callahan's new partner, Chico Gonzales, soon learns that Dirty Harry has earned his moniker by taking every squalid job that comes along, including grabbing a suicidal man before he flings himself off of a ledge as well as delivering ransom money to Scorpio. His commonsensical methods of law enforcement stretch and sometimes break the rules, but Dirty Harry is honest, incorruptible, and obsessed with his work. Callahan exudes a blunt masculinity that is, above all else, practical. In an early scene with a character listed in the credits only as "The Mayor," a device that emphasizes his lack of individuality and entrenchment in the system, Harry the populist hero stands in stark contrast to this elected official with the bureaucratic mindset. The Mayor possesses a soft, aristocratic handsomeness that makes one suspect that those in charge of casting had John Lindsay in mind when they filled the role. His speaking voice is smooth and mellifluous, and his eloquent diction indicates an expensive education and privileged background. He works sequestered in a luxurious office of rich mahogany and fine leather far removed from the gritty reality of the streets. Harry, by contrast, has good looks best described as rugged. His speaking voice is gruff, and profanity often punctuates his blunt, clipped sentences. The unflappable Harry works in the dirty reality of the mean streets; early in the film he even foils a bank robbery while eating a hot dog. This exchange epitomizes the clash of these characters' worldviews:

Mayor: Callahan?

Harry: Sir?

Mayor: I don't want any more trouble like you had last year in the Fillmore district. Understand? That's my policy.

Harry: Yeah, well, when an adult male is chasing a female with an intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That's my policy.

Mayor: Intent? How did you establish that?

Harry: Well, a naked man's chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross.

After Harry leaves, the Mayor admits to the Chief that Callahan has a point. Despite this admission, the audience recognizes that Harry's battles are not just with the criminal element. In order to protect the women and children of San Francisco (Scorpio exclusively victimizes women and children), he has to battle elites making and enforcing rules that make it nearly impossible for him to do his work.

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Callahan's practicality makes him suspicious of university learning and theoretical approaches to police work. When he meets Gonzalez for the first time, he mutters, "Just what I need, it's a college boy." After Harry finds out his new partner's degree is in Sociology, he repeats it sarcastically, and warns: "Just don't let your Sociology degree get you killed. I'm liable to get killed along with you." In a later scene that occurs after the city has received another letter from Scorpio, the Chief of Police, as Bingham points out, "fusses with lint on his blue serge ," one of many signs suggesting that the law "has been feminized" (190). The Chief, who is also identified not by name but only by his position as a high-ranking member of the system, explains to Gonzales why Scorpio is likely to return to the same roof from which he shot the woman in the swimming pool: "You see, these sick guys have behavior patterns. We know for a fact they'll rob the very same store three, four times in a row. It must appeal to their superego or something." To the Chief, Scorpio's crimes are symptoms of an illness, a liberal perspective the film codes feminine. Such a line of thinking could lead one to consider the criminal in a larger context, and could even humanize him. Callahan, by contrast, eschews such psychobabble in favor of concrete facts:

Harry: You know, there's one other reason why he might pick the same rooftop. It's got a very clear view of the St. Peter and Paul's Church.

Lieutenant: And they're having a Novena tonight.

Chief: Well, go on.

Lieutenant: Well, the note. He threatened to kill a Catholic Priest or a Negro. The Russell boy was black.

Harry: He may just figure he owes himself a padre.

In the same scene, the Chief notices Callahan's .458 Magnum rife and comments that it could "stop an elephant" before adding, "Apparently you like a little edge." Callahan acknowledges that he indeed likes to get as much of an edge as he can, and the Chief admonishes him by stressing, "Well, there's no elephant, Harry. He's no animal of any kind. Remember that." But by the logic of the film, Scorpio is not human; he functions as the embodiment of evil. In addition to being listed in the credits only as "Killer," Siegel presents the character as a Manson-esque wild- eyed hippie degenerate with long hair and a peace sign belt buckle. Over the phone, probably to ensure that he embodies the audience's conception of Hippie, Scorpio calls Harry names such as "pig bastard" and "rotten oinker." Dirty Harry argues that to approach this miscreant as a human being with a psychological profile functioning in a larger sociological context would be to indulge in an impractical, feminine, and liberal mindset that takes the edge from the police and gives free reign to degenerate criminals. Such a mindset would also jeopardize any chance the police hero would have of rescuing Ann Mary Deacon, the kidnapping victim with a very Catholic name, before her oxygen supply runs out. With Gonzales in the hospital, Harry and the rotund Inspector DeGeorgio make their way to Kezar Stadium, where Scorpio has been working and living. At the chain link fence, DeGeorgio warns, "Illegal entry. No warrant." Harry simply replies, "Looks like we climb." And despite his two cracked ribs, he does just that. Inside the stadium, Harry breaks into Scorpio's

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living quarters and chases him onto the football field just as DeGeorgio turns on the lights. Scorpio puts up his hands, but Harry shoots and wounds him.

Scorpio (on the ground, with Harry walking toward him): No, no, no! Don't do anything more! No, you tried to kill me!

De Georgio: You need any help, Harry?

Harry: Go on out and get some air, fatso.

Scorpio: Please! No more! I'm hurt. Can't you see I'm hurt? You shot me! Please don't! Don't! Let me have a doctor. Let me have a doctor. Please, get me the doctor. Don't kill me!

Harry: The girl, where is she?

Scorpio: You tried to kill me!

Harry: If I tried that, your head'd be splattered all over this field. Now, where's the girl?

Scorpio: I want a lawyer.

Harry: I said, where's the girl?

Scorpio: I have the right to a lawyer.

Harry: Where's the girl?

Scorpio: I have the right to a lawyer! Need to go to the doctor. Please! I have rights. I want a lawyer!

Harry grinds his foot into Scorpio's stab wound, torturing him for the whereabouts of his victim as the camera pans up and out of the stadium. In this scene Dirty Harry makes the point that liberal court rulings such as Miranda and Escobedo have so perverted the criminal justice system that evildoers are given the advantage, young Christian girls are put in peril, and dedicated police officers are regarded as criminals. To make matters worse, Scorpio knows the law and attempts to use it to his utmost benefit. Here Siegel relies on the ticking bomb scenario to make his point, to show the clash of in-the-thick-of- it practicality versus liberal, ivory tower abstractions. To protect and serve, Harry has to break laws that have been warped by the liberal judiciary to coddle bent freaks such as Scorpio. To further drive these points home to the audience, Harry is brought into the corridors of power where, to his astonishment, the bespectacled (read: intellectual) District Attorney lets him know, "You're lucky I'm not indicting you for assault with intent to commit murder."

Harry: What?

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Rothko: Where the hell does it say you've got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects? Deny medical attention and legal counsel? Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I'm saying is, that man had rights.

Harry: Well, I'm all broken up about that man's rights.

Rothko: You should be. I've got news for you, Callahan. As soon as he's well enough to leave the hospital, he walks.

Harry: What are you talking about?

Rothko: He's free!

Harry: You mean you're letting him go?

Rothko: We have to. We can't try him.

District Attorney Rothko further explains that trying Scorpio would be a waste of time and taxpayer money because the rifle Harry took from his apartment, having been illegally obtained, is inadmissible as evidence. Rothko tells him that it's the law, to which Harry replies, "Well then the law is crazy." On cue, Rothko introduces to Harry and the audience the personification of the law gone crazy, Judge Bannerman. Bannerman not only sits on the appellate court, he holds classes on constitutional law at Berkley, a word designed to elicit in the audience's mind images of hippie war protestors, drugs, and radicals taking over college campuses across the country. Bannerman, in short, symbolizes an authority figure unable or unwilling to put an end to anarchy. He represents a judiciary that reads the constitution as favoring criminals, and in this scene he undermines Inspector Callahan's work.

Bannerman: Well, in my opinion, the search of the suspect's quarters was illegal. Evidence obtained, thereby, such as that hunting rifle, for instance, is inadmissible in court. You should have gotten a search warrant. I'm sorry, but it's that simple.

Harry: Search warrant? There was a girl dying.

Rothko: She was, in fact, dead according to the medical report.

Harry: But I didn't know that.

Bannerman: The court would have to recognize the police officer's legitimate concern for the girl's life, but there is no way they can possibly condone police torture. All evidence concerning the girl, the suspect's confession, all physical evidence, would have to be excluded.

Harry: There must be something you can get him on.

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Bannerman: Without the evidence of the gun and the girl? I couldn't convict him of spitting on the sidewalk. Now, the suspect's rights were violated under the Fourth and Fifth and probably the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Harry: And Ann Mary Deacon, what about her rights? I mean, she's raped and left in a hole to die? Who speaks for her?

Rothko replies that the DA's office would speak for her if only Harry would let it. Despite this assertion, Dirty Harry makes the argument that the legal system does not speak for victims; it protects criminals. This particular scene plays as a dramatization of the main points of Nixon's "Toward Freedom from Fear" paper. Rothko cites Miranda and Escobedo, and he and the judge personify the forces within the legal system that are, as Nixon put it, "ham stringing the peace forces in our society and strengthening the criminal forces." Also, Scorpio adeptly uses legal technicalities to his advantage, and he represents a "patently guilty" party securing his freedom on "the barbed wire legalisms" the Supreme Court has erected to protect the rights of criminals and shield them from punishment. The scene ends with Rothko forbidding Harry from following Scorpio, insisting that "This office won't stand for any harassment," while Harry argues that Scorpio will kill again simply because "he likes it." To make this point, Siegel cuts to a shot of Scorpio smiling beatifically as he scours a playground full of children for his next victim. This scene features two peace signs. One serves as Scorpio's belt buckle, and the other has been spray-painted on a wall along with the phrase "Down with pigs." Siegel here, as he does throughout the movie, links hippies with disrespect for law and order, which he carefully connects to the endangerment of innocent women and children. Siegel also takes pains to embed such images in a carefully constructed context of permissiveness. When Harry stops for lunch early in the picture, he parks in front of an adult book store. After the scene on the playground, he follows Scorpio to a strip club. When Scorpio notices that Callahan has trailed him, he leaves the club and leads Harry down a sleazy street of neon decadence. Such shots articulate the socially conservative belief that crime, immorality, and permissiveness are inextricably linked to the counterculture and disrespect for law and order. Dirty Harry argues that Scorpio's rampage has been made possible by a breakdown of traditional values, and the film makes a point of implicating the media in this collapse. The villain manipulates print and television outlets by paying a man to beat him almost beyond recognition. While on a gurney he whines to the cameras that Inspector Callahan has done this to him even though he is "supposed to be innocent until proven guilty." Of course Harry is not contacted to tell his side of the story. With the media brought in to share the blame, the film has now implicated the bureaucracy, the judiciary, academia, and the media for their role in creating a system that has created and perpetuates a permissive society that denigrates its law and order officials and gives hippies such as Scorpio free reign to rape and kill. Against this system Harry Callahan stands as a martyr figure. He leads a solitary existence because his wife was killed years before by a drunk driver, and he appears to have nothing in his life besides his work. Siegel occasionally juxtaposes some Christ imagery with Harry to imply the extent of the Inspector's sacrifices. When Chico and Harry stake out the St. Peter and Paul's Church, they are situated on a building with a rotating sign atop it that reads in blue and red letters "JESUS SAVES." Siegel films Eastwood awash in the hellish electric red, giving the impression that Harry is on a mission to the underworld. When Scorpio fires at the

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two police officers, he cackles demonically as he shoots and destroys the word "SAVES." Later, when Harry delivers the one hundred thousand dollars in exchange for Ann Mary Deacon, Scorpio positions him against the concrete cross perched at the top of Mount Davidson Park and beats him. Finally, late in the film when Scorpio sees Harry poised on the overpass waiting to jump on the school bus, he mutters "Jesus." Indeed, as Richard Combs notes, Harry utters his first spoken word, "Jesus," when he finds Scorpio's initial ransom note. Combs calls the religious aspect of the film "as unmissable as it is hard to account for" before suggesting that "martyrdom to his job is one way to describe Harry's curse" (52-53). Houck acknowledges Combs' claim, but argues that "religion is nothing but a profanity between Scorpio and Harry" (78). Ron Large's discussion of the redemptive hero in Shane and Death Wish sheds light on this dimension of Dirty Harry. Large argues that "redemption is the general framework of heroic activity," and "redemption functions to restore what has been lost" (236). With this in mind, I argue that Siegel presents Harry Callahan as a practical, working-class hero, a redeemer figure who sacrifices himself to restore the order and sanity lost when liberals hijacked such institutions as the judiciary, academia, and the media. Siegel's messianic imagery places Harry, and social conservatism, on the side of the angels while feeding the persecution complex integral to the conservative movement. New Yorker film critic emphasized Callahan's martyrdom, and her review of the film is called "St. Cop." Kael hated Dirty Harry. Her scathing review, appearing as it did in a New York-based, liberal-leaning, high-culture magazine, illustrates the cultural divide of the crime issue. Kael reads the opening tribute to fallen police officers as designed to put audience members in a respectful frame of mind, and she argues that the film offers liberals as "a magically simple culprit for their deaths." To Kael, Dirty Harry is not a depiction of the real San Francisco police; "it's about a right-wing fantasy of that police force as a group helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals." According to Kael, Siegel was once considered to be liberal, but with this picture he applied his talents to "a single-minded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place." She adds, in my favorite phrase of the piece, that "Dirty Harry is a kind of hardhat The Fountainhead." Kael especially takes issue with its portrayal of the villain, Scorpio. She notes that he is presented as "pure evil;" he is not a criminal "for whom we need feel any responsibility or sympathy, yet he stands for everything the audience fears and loathes." Distinguishing between art and genre pieces designed to turn on audiences (while acknowledging some overlap between the two), Kael concedes that the film is "stunningly well-made" as a genre picture and "smooth and trim" in its ability to craft suspense. Kael is distressed by the combination of Siegel's skill at playing the audience, the contemplative limits of the action drama, and Dirty Harry's refusal to consider that the root causes of crime might be more complicated than pure evil:

In the action genre, it's easier—and more fun—to treat crime in this medieval way, as evil, without specific causes or background. What produces a killer might be a subject for the artist, but it's a nuisance to an exciter, who doesn't want to slow the action down.

Kael argues that even for the action genre, Dirty Harry is "more archetypal than most movies," and she refers to it as a piece of "fascist medievalism." Such charges are not limited to popular critics. Academic critics such as Anthony Chase excoriate the film as a "fascist love poem," "sick and profoundly dangerous," and "poisonous" (2-3), while Charles T. Gregory calls it "indefensibly flawed and exploitive" (5), "a portrait of the

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fascist as winner," and "marred by its blatant manipulation of plot for purposes" (8). Eric Patterson contends that Dirty Harry "gives us no information about the killer's history. The deliberate lack of depth in his characterization makes him seem nearly inhuman, a kind of Gothic monster more like a wild beast or a force of nature than a person" (96). Patterson makes this point, however, as part of his greater argument that Siegel represents Scorpio "as a pure, almost abstract threat rather than as a reasoning human being" in order to focus attention "on the conflict between Harry and his superiors over how to deal with the crisis" (96). In other words, to flesh out the Scorpio character by illustrating his motives and constructing the sociological context that created his criminality would divert attention from the film's true point of conflict, the individualist hero versus the entrenched power structure. Indeed, Patterson concedes that, "as Kael and others have pointed out, Eastwood's police movies say little about the economic and social causes of urban crime" and "certainly endorse reactionary policies" so he can stress his point that such films as Dirty Harry actually

aren't about crime. Criminals exist in them primarily as pretexts for displaying the irresponsibility and selfishness of those who are the true focus of the Eastwood character's rage, the mayors and police commissioners who are concerned primarily with protecting and perpetrating their own power and who perceive Harry Callahan and others like him simply as a means to those ends. (93)

Patterson's concern with the bureaucratic structure against which Harry struggles leads him to use the term "pods" throughout his essay, which links Dirty Harry to Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers while emphasizing that being trapped in such an organization robs one of the freedom to think and act as an independent individual. Speaking generally, Patterson argues that such a dramatization accounts for Eastwood's enduring popularity, which he claims results from "his persistent use of the theme of rebellion against forms of established authority which deprive the individual of autonomy" (93). Speaking more specifically, Patterson asserts that Harry Callahan endures because his "righteous defiance provides a satisfying form of vicarious retribution for people who do dirty jobs for ungrateful bosses every day" (97). I should note that Patterson criticizes the effect of these movies as "regressive" because they channel feelings that "could precipitate radical structural change in directions which will not lead to disruption of existing structures" (94). With this criticism in mind, Patterson derides as simplistic articles decrying Dirty Harry as fascist because the hero's "real adversaries are not the criminals he pursues or the liberal law makers who seek to protect their rights" (93). He further denounces "hostile critics" who focus on Callahan's anger over such "liberal laws" as the "Miranda and Escobedo rulings, which limit his power to act against suspected criminals" (94). While conceding that the movie does show these rulings to hinder law enforcement, Patterson contends that such critics "overlook substantial evidence that its depiction of liberal laws is part of a vehement attack on established social authority" (94). My contention here is that Patterson could have gone one step further and connected these "liberal law makers" to the entrenched power structure against which he sees Harry rebelling. In other words, my argument is that Siegel depicts the "established social authority," as Patterson puts it, as a liberal established social authority. Patterson's essay actually underscores Harry Callahan's populist appeal, and his acknowledgement that "Harry has conservative, working-class values," which comes across in part via his "contempt for liberal therapeutic solutions to the problem of urban crime" (93), supports my assertion that the character stands as

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a paragon of socially conservative working-class populism taking a stand against the entrenched liberal establishment. However, my reading of Dirty Harry insists that the film is indeed about crime. Rather than reading Siegel's use of criminality as a pretext for exposing an entrenched authority, I interpret Siegel's work as presenting unchecked criminality as the result of this liberal entrenched authority. In short, I argue that the characterization of Scorpio as a dehumanized form of evil in the abstract serves to perpetuate a socially conservative perspective that vilifies liberalism as an unrealistic belief system that coddles criminals while removing from public discussion the sociological context that creates criminal behavior. This socially conservative perspective, it should go without saying, also checks any imagining of a radical structural change that would benefit those who do dirty jobs for an ungrateful economic elite. Still other critics, however, charge that reading the film from such a political angle is too easy. Pierre Greenfield argues that "with Nixon tooling up at full throttle for his '72 victory, it was the easiest thing in the world to smear the film as law-and-order propaganda and redneck exploitation of all America's worst urban paranoias," and he adds derisively that "this was all added up to equal " (35). Greenfield's article is noteworthy for the way in which he twists the "redneck" angle. According to his reading, "Scorpio seems some kind of hippy, Harry a straight cop; but it's Scorpio who is the true redneck" (36). As evidence, Greenfield cites the fact that one of the killer's notes states that his next victim will be a Catholic priest or a "nigger," and he is also seen taking aim at a homosexual. Perhaps with Kael's article in mind, Greenfield argues that "the police as an institution emerge from the film very badly," which leads him to read the film's opening dedication as ironic, "almost as ironic as Scorpio's peace-sign belt buckle, which is as much a false image, a lie to himself, as Harry's peace-officer's badge" (36). He contends that Harry's final confrontation with Scorpio is nothing less than "cold-blooded murder," and that Siegel and Eastwood take pains to make Harry such an attractive character to force the audience members to confront their own moral structure: "Identification with the reprehensible characteristics of a film's protagonist makes us aware of similar defects in ourselves, an eminently good thing—for the morally honest" (36). Greenfield could only have arrived at such an interpretation of the film by ignoring Dirty Harry's damnation of the Miranda and Escobedo cases plus the pavlovian potential of the Berkeley law professor. He would also have to ignore the Christ imagery of the film to read Harry as anything even approaching morally defective or the police as anything less than saintly. And although Scorpio may target marginalized groups throughout the movie, one could logically claim that Siegel added this twist to short circuit liberal criticisms of the film – to no avail. Houck also complicates the politics of the film, and to do so he also links the badge and belt buckle of the hero and villain. He states that many critics of the film "locate much of its appeal in a cultural moment when white men needed a new hero, a hero who could also take on an increasingly liberal criminal justice system resulting from the Warren court decisions of the 1960s" (66). To this end he cites the work of James Bingham, who claims that the four Eastwood and Siegel collaborations between 1968 and 1971, which includes Dirty Harry, have

a defensive, reclamatory spirit, as if grabbing back the standards and the white perceived it had lost to , the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam protest, sixties youth culture, the so-called sexual revolution, the civil-libertarian decisions of the Supreme Court led by , and the "permissive philosophy" in general. (qtd. in Houck 66)

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He also notes that many critics of the film derided it as fascistic before claiming that he finds "both sets of interpretations too easy." While acknowledging that "Dirty Harry can be read as a reinstantiation of white, heteronormative masculinity, a reheroicizing of the middle-class white male" and that "the film can also be read as a 'right-wing hoot,' a lone individual who takes 'justice' into his own hands, civil liberties be damned," he argues that what he sees as the thematic and formal linking of Harry Callahan and Scorpio "as monstrous conjoined progeny" muddies the politics of the movie (67). With this monstrosity in mind, Houck closely reads many scenes where, he contends, Siegel intentionally blurs the hero and villain, Callahan and Scorpio, to complicate rather than resolve "the ideological tensions always latent within monstrosity" (67). Dirty Harry, he claims, ultimately puts forth an advisory rhetoric: "beware of pursuing and executing society's monsters, if for no other reason than that you risk embodying their monstrous characteristics" (68). Houck, as does Greenfield, argues that the film challenges his audience: "Dirty Harry does not allow its viewers to 'overlook' the 'violence condoned' in the 'ceremony' or the 'spectacle' in the pursuit of justice. That violence is too conspicuous and too stylized; it invites critique even as it revels in its own excess" (68). Houck makes a compelling argument, but ultimately his case is undermined by relying too much on an audience's willingness to accept a film's invitation to critique its excessively spectacular violence. His argument also relies too much on his dismissal of religion as "nothing but a profanity between Scorpio and Harry" (78), a claim I mention above. I contend that the Christ imagery of Dirty Harry is too blatant and recurrent to disregard as Houck does. My acceptance of this symbolism solidifies Harry as a redeemer figure with whom the audience identifies, reinforces the evilness of Scorpio, and ultimately clarifies the politics of the movie. Kael's charge of fascism, the ultimate point to which her article builds, rests on the assumption that Dirty Harry's audience would indeed be more inclined to relate to, rather than critique, Harry Callahan. I return now to her article because so much criticism, academic and popular, seems compelled to address her excoriation of the film. I will also put her work in dialogue with that of Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel, who took umbrage with this fascist label, because their conflicting perspectives exemplify the ongoing cultural clash over how to regard criminality and its origins. For her part, Kael contends that the action genre has always had within it "a fascist potential," and with Dirty Harry it comes to light. She asserts that Harry, with whom the audience obviously identifies, cannot destroy the purely evil Scorpio "because of the legal protections, such as the court rulings on Miranda and Escobedo, that a weak, liberal society gives its criminals." Harry is therefore dirty because he recognizes that, in spite of the laws that indulges criminals and undermines police officers, "evil must be dealt with; he is our martyr—stained on our behalf." Kael recounts seeing the film with a Puerto Rican audience that jeered when Scorpio pleaded for his rights. She argues that they could jeer because "in the movie laws protecting the rights of the accused are seen not as remedies for the mistreatment of the poor by the police and the courts but as protection for evil abstracted from all social conditions." The same audience identified with and applauded Harry "because the liberals don't succeed in stopping him." Kael sides with the liberals, taking a sociological view of crime:

If crime were caused by superevil dragons, there would be no Miranda, no Escobedo; we could all be licensed to kill, like Dirty Harry. But since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.

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Pauline Kael versus Dirty Harry articulates a debate that started in the courts, spread to the political discourse, and landed in the cinema. A quarter century later, Richard Schickel would take up this argument against Kael in his biography of Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood. Schickel describes Kael's review as a "vicious assault on the picture," and he adds that "One still gropes for some rational justification for it." Leading up to the Kael accusation that seems to have particularly irked him, that Dirty Harry is fascistic, Schickel credits critic with not charging the movie "with vigilantism" (273). Actually, though, she did. Kael recognizes the picture's final scene as an allusion to High Noon, but she argues that the moment when Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan throws his badge into the water differs in a crucial way from the moment when Gary Cooper's Will Kane tosses his badge into the dust:

Cooper, the marshal, singlehandedly cleaned up the outlaw gang and then threw his badge on the ground in contempt for the cowardice of the townspeople, who didn't live up to the principles of the law and wouldn't help him defend it. Dirty Harry says that the laws were written by dupes who protect criminal rats and let women and children be tortured, and Eastwood throws his badge away because he doesn't respect the law; he stands for vigilante justice.

This High Noon allusion indicates an interesting and multifaceted link between urban crime thrillers of the early Seventies and the western genre, a link we will discuss below. James Damico notes Kael's evocation of High Noon in his discussion of the 1932 western entitled, interestingly enough, Law and Order (146), a phrase that would become politically ubiquitous in the late 1960s and early 1970s after the drastic spike in the national crime rate. The protagonist, Frame Johnson (perhaps not the most appropriate first name for a heroic law enforcement official), is a town marshal who realizes that he can only control lawlessness by initiating an illegal gunfight with a murderous family wreaking havoc in his community. Frame ultimately succeeds and, in a gesture that anticipates High Noon and Dirty Harry, throws his badge at the feet of the local judge – a representative of the legal system – and rides away (145- 46). Damico's fascinating article asserts that commentaries on the spate of vigilante movies released in the early 1970s, which also includes Billy Jack, Straw Dogs, The French Connection, and Walking Tall, should "point out that from 1931 to 1934 a persistent strain of Hollywood films not only offered the same authoritarian solutions to similar problems, but in many instances did so in identical particulars" (141). He shows, for example, how the 1932 police picture, The Beast of the City, stands as "a perfect paradigm for Dirty Harry" (147). The Beast of the City features a prologue calling for the glorification of policemen who do their duty and sacrifice their lives to protect the public. It also tells the story of "Fighting Fitzpatrick," another police officer with a cool nickname who does battle against an arch criminal who exploits loopholes in the legal system to elude justice (147-48). The emphasis, according to Damico, in both this film and Dirty Harry, "is on the vigilantism of the professional lawman" (148). As for Schickel missing Kael's charge of vigilantism, one suspects he was working hard to give her, from his perspective, the benefit of the doubt. He urges his readers, presumably Eastwood fans, to consider that in the space of a month, she had written about Dirty Harry, 's A Clockwork Orange, and 's Straw Dogs. The latter two contain vicious rapes and ultra-violence, and Schickel argues that Kael "wanted her readers to stop and think about the increasingly bold portrayal of violent behavior on the screen" (273). For Schickel, however, there seems to be no explanation for Kael's main charge: "But fascism,

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with its implication of racism—that was hot, strong stuff. And never mind that it misconstrues Harry's character and the movie's intent" (274). To counter Kael's repudiation, Schickel breaks out the dictionary and asserts that Harry Callahan does not fit any of the term's definitions: he has nothing to say about nation, he is racially color-blind, and he has a contentious relationship with authority (274). Kael briefly addresses the race issue when she notes that "The movie shrewdly makes the maniac smart, well-spoken, and white, and in order to clear Harry of any charge of prejudice or racism he is given a Mexican partner." I would add to that the fact that the intern who treats Harry, the aforementioned Steve, is an African American with whom he shares a genuine rapport – in his autobiography, Don Siegel states that the scene exists primarily "to show our audience that Harry was not a bigot" (369). Also, Harry's partners in several sequels will include an African-American male, a Caucasian female, and an Asian-American male. Race and dictionary definitions aside, I read Kael's fascism accusation as stemming in large part from the audience's reaction to the film. Recall her recounting of the Puerto Ricans'7 mockery of Scorpio when he pleaded for his rights. As I wrote above, Kael was most bothered by the film's recasting of these rights as protecting pure evil rather than "remedies for the mistreatment of the poor by the police and the courts." The scene Kael describes in the movie theatre horrified her because, I suspect, she watched it from the perspective of a person familiar with 's "The in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In that essay, Benjamin argues that Fascism (he always capitalized the term) attempts to organize

proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. (241)

Kael watched a proletarian audience express themselves by jeering Scorpio and mocking the values of liberalism, which, it is worth noting, is an ideology that advocates not only ensuring their rights under the law, but redistributing entrenched wealth, a process from which they would presumably benefit. Even if we back away from calling the film fascist, Dirty Harry at the least represents another instance of the Right shifting attention from issues of wealth and poverty to social issues such as crime. The liberal elite in the film indicates the extent to which elite had lost its economic connotation. Harry is a working class conservative populist hero who does not battle plutocrats; he battles an entrenched liberal aristocracy – the bureaucracy, the judiciary, academia, and the media – that appeases evil-doers. Kael argues that the audience with whom she watched Dirty Harry had themselves been victimized by the police and courts. To her, their cheering of Harry represents, as Benjamin puts it, a self-alienation that "has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (242). Of course, anybody with even a passing familiarity with talk radio or other conservative outlets would be able to anticipate the replies to such claims. Pauline Kael was part of the East Coast media elite, a liberal who looked down on the masses as unaware of their own best interests. Schickel defends Dirty Harry but is discreet about his own political inclinations. He avoids overtly charging Kael with elitism, but he does contend that she elected to see the mass movie audience "as essentially innocent, unable to defend itself against exploitation by a motion-

7 I assume she noted their ethnicity to denote a group of people who have traditionally been on the poorer side of the economic spectrum. 150

picture industry, toward which she always took a Manichean stance." Schickel adds that the movie industry, "as she saw it, corrupted not only its audience, but all whom it employed" (275). In other words, he does insinuate that Kael believed herself to know what was best for the commoners who went to such movies as Dirty Harry, a quasi-populist stance that extends into how he interprets the movie. Schickel advocates a reading that makes the crime issue secondary to the power structure in which the Callahan character struggles. According to Schickel, "Read in this way Harry's indifference to Miranda and Escobedo becomes logically explicable; they sound to him like more bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, yet another incomprehensible—and uncomprehending— memo from on high" (274). With that in mind, Schickel calls Kael's case against the film, her claim that Dirty Harry is immoral because it omits the sociopsychological context that created Scorpio's criminality, "overstated and more deviously argued" than her charges of fascism. He argues that Dirty Harry is hardly the first work of fiction to "present us with a villain whose monstrousness passed all rational understanding," and cites Moriarty, Marbuse, Iago, and Richard III as examples. From contemporary real life, he offers serial killers Ted Bundy, the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, and Jeffrey Dahmer as just "a few of the many strange creatures who have swum up from the murk of modern life and are not to be explained adequately by poverty or parental abuse" (274-75). But Kael actually argues that "crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice." In other words, crime is caused by a combination of factors, which may include poverty, abuse, and mental illness. A cursory glance at the biographies of any of the strange tabloid creatures that Schickel lists gives credence to this claim. Albert DeSalvo's ("The Boston Strangler") childhood is particularly horrifying. Indeed, Picart and Greek cite the work of Lonnie Athens to illustrate how a "series of common life experiences" result "in the creation of monsters" (20), and none of these experiences include being born evil. Kael's point about the causes of criminality is essentially the same one that the Kerner Commission tried to make about the root causes of the riots: there are numerous and complicated factors at work; or, put more simply, it is not that simple. And this is a problem that proponents of liberalism always seem to find themselves facing. They ask people to sift through complex determinants and sit with notions of social construction while their opponents offer facile explanations based on a comforting essentialism. And then assertions such as the one in the previous sentence are met with charges of effete elitism. Consider this sentence from Schickel regarding Kael's argument about Dirty Harry's take on the crime issue: "There is something uncharacteristically prissy, almost social workerish, in the language Kael uses to address this issue" (275). With the word prissy we get a combination of prim and sissy, which combined means hoitytoity and effeminate. The term social workerish conveys an image of social engineering, a rhetorical bugaboo conservatives have trotted out for decades. In short, Schickel defends Dirty Harry by utilizing the language of conservative populism. Schickel buttresses his argument by quoting critic David Thomson, who attributes Dirty Harry's popularity to its appeal to Middle Americans fed up with the social upheavals of the 1960s: "Those saved by the social revolutions of the 1960s were only ever a few. Eastwood guessed, or knew in his bones, that Harry's 'dirtiness' was a refreshing reclaiming of common sense and direct action as far as middle America was concerned" (qtd. in Schickel 277). Schickel expands on this idea by stressing, as he puts it, "the polarized political climate" into which Dirty Harry was released. He mentions the Vietnam War and the Kent State killings, and he argues that there was during that time "a parallel between taking a hard line on crime and taking a hard line

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on the war." These stances were linked to class, and Harry Callahan's individualistic struggles against the system mirrored those of many in the audience:

Harry's working-class roots and attitudes were the source of his appeal to the mass audience. It is obvious that by subjecting his activities, his moral decisions, if you will, to second-guessing by a temporizing bureaucracy, the film placed him under pressures every working stiff, for that matter every middle-management drone, in America understood. (278)

Harry Callahan became a working-class hero at a time when, "in all the better circles, blue collar males were the objects of scorn and fear." Even if they were not police officers and subject to being called a "pig" as Harry was, they "and their hard-hatted brethren formed the hard core of the hated Silent Majority," and this core "often not so silently mounted muscular counterdemonstrations against war protests." And even though Harry Callahan never spoke out on the war, war protests, or other such issues beyond the scope of crime, Schickel asserts that "It was easy enough to extrapolate from his bluntly expressed attitude about criminal rights a whole range of unspoken opinions, make him into a generalized symbol of much that was hatefully illiberal in American life at that time" (278). Despite Dirty Harry's obvious place in the history of the culture war, Schickel contends that Eastwood is not (and Siegel was not) an intellectual of the "literary-political" variety (280). In his autobiography, Siegel denies having had any political motives and argues against recognizing any such content: "I can't understand why, when a film is made purely for entertainment, it should be criticized on a political basis" (373). As for Eastwood, Schickel writes that the actor was interested in the role because it articulated "the frustrations of the typical American male, in relation to his work, in relation to whatever system he served, most accurately, while at the same time portraying his impotent rage, his growing sense of isolation in a rapidly changing world" (280). Desiring to capture a sense of male frustration and alienation that resulted from his increasing loss of power in an evolving world does seem like a political act, though. Schickel also claims that, ultimately, action movies are about action, and their interest is primarily superficial. As such, "it is as a rule absurd, and utterly unrealistic, to see ideological motives, let alone ideological malevolence, as their prime cause" (280). Schickel's point, then, seems to be that a director and star, who are disinclined toward abstract thinking, work in a superficial genre, and do not intend to make a political statement, should not be read as having an ideological impact. His insistence calls to mind Kenneth Burke's rule of thumb, articulated in A Rhetoric of Motives, that "whenever you find a doctrine of 'nonpolitical' esthetics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics" (28). Indeed, Schickel condescendingly contends that "serious general discussion of crime's causes and cures have been largely silenced," and "no serious commentator today would advance a description of criminal motives as naïve as Kael's" (277-78). He adds to this the claim that "even liberals no longer wish to 'understand' criminals; we simply want them to be punished" (278). Schickel argues that this change in attitude is not "entirely" the result of society having "succumbed to reactionary rhetoric;" Kael and her ilk helped facilitate the shift in thinking:

Unrealistic and ineffectual sentimentalism of the kind Kael indulged in played its role in bringing us to this pass. Like it or not, we live in a Dirty Harry kind of world, and, if

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anything, the movie seems more prescient—more 'realistic' if you will—than alarming. (278)

Schickel is certainly correct that commentators with Kael's point of view on this issue are no longer considered "serious," meaning only that they have been marginalized, excluded from the conversation in the mainstream – and supposedly liberal – media. But to pin this result on Kael and others with the point of view she articulated is completely unreasonable. As I showed above, Dirty Harry dramatizes many of the points Nixon made in his "Toward Freedom from Fear" paper. That the action genre is considered superficial, meaning it supposedly lacks the depth necessary for ideological content, is precisely the reason why action films (such as Dirty Harry) should be read with critical seriousness, for ideology functions best when it is invisible. We can disregard a filmmaker's intent, or lack of intent; what matters is the ideological impact the movie had. Dirty Harry plays a role in normalizing the idea that the causes of criminal activity exist apart from any sociological context, and it perpetuates a conception of liberals as effete, elitist bureaucrats who favor criminals and look down their noses at hardworking police officers. The Harry Callahan character offered a model that stood as the antithesis of liberalism. Harry represents the quintessential construction of masculine, working-class, Middle American practicality; he symbolizes the populist blue-collar social conservative at odds with the liberal elite power structure that was scorning him and his values and corrupting his country. Harry Callahan stands as an idealized version of the figure the Republican Party needed in order to solidify their new majority, and as such he indicates a point where the notions of constituency and audience overlap. In other words, the filmmakers and the GOP were making their pitches to the same disaffected Middle Americans. Perhaps this melding of cinema and politics was best exemplified in the mid-1980s when President Ronald Reagan likened his veto pen to Harry Callahan's .44 Magnum, warning the "tax increasers" in Congress:

No matter how well intentioned they might be, no matter what their illusions may be, I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead and make my day. (Boyd B28)

This was a line from the third Dirty Harry sequel, Sudden Impact, and it represents the type of shtick the movie actor-turned-politician utilized to appeal to his so-called "Reagan Democrats," those socially-conservative, working-class Democrats who helped him to two landslide victories. The Dirty Harry character, in the 1970s and the 1980s, served as common ground for working- class males and the Republican Party.

Dirty Harry Makes One Thing Perfectly Clear The first sequel to Dirty Harry, entitled Magnum Force, came out two years later on Christmas Day 1973. Schickel writes that Clint Eastwood liked the story for its originality, "and it would give his character a chance to establish unequivocably his antifascist credentials" (298- 99). In a scene in which he seems to address his detractors in the press as much as the other characters in the scene, Harry Callahan states for the record that "I'm afraid you've misjudged me." Directed by Ted Post, Magnum Force opens with a credit sequence featuring godawful

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Seventies cop movie music and a profile shot of Harry's black .44 Magnum with a finger (presumably Harry's) on the trigger. After a minute or so he cocks it, points it toward the camera, and gives an abbreviated version of his routine from the first movie: "This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world. And it could blow your head clean off. Do you feel lucky?" And then he shoots the gun. This campy curtain raising is a world away in style and tone from the somber reverence with which the original begins. Despite this difference, Magnum Force shares with Dirty Harry an extreme distaste for legal technicalities that enable murderous thugs to escape their well-deserved incarceration. The story begins with mobster Carmine Ricca on his way out of the halls of justice after having been acquitted, due to a lack of admissible evidence, of complicity in the murders of a labor reformer and his family. Ricca, his lawyer, and his driver are gunned down minutes later by a vigilante traffic cop. When Harry arrives at the scene with his new partner, an African American named Early Smith, his supervisor, Lieutenant Briggs, informs him that he has taken him off of homicide and loaned him to the stakeout unit because, he tells Harry, "We can't have the public crying 'police brutality' every time you go out on the street." The audience also learns that Briggs has been on the force longer than Harry and is proud that he has never had to take his gun out of its holster. Harry and the audience are thrown off the trail of the actual vigilante killer when he runs into his old friend Charlie, a police officer who seems burned out to the point of taking the law into his own hands. Charlie rails to Harry in an explosion of words that would have fit quite comfortably in the original film:

These days, a cop kills a hoodlum on the street, he might as well just dump the body some place. Because those snot-nosed young bastards down at the DA's office will crucify them one way or another. A hood can kill a cop, but let a cop kill a hood… Am I right?

Harry tactfully suggests that Charlie take early retirement before saying goodbye and going into the shooting range, where he meets four gung ho rookie traffic cops who are expert shots. There follows a series of scenes in which traffic cops with really good aim kill mobsters, pimps, and other such undesirables. At this point in the film, it is obvious to the audience that the rookies are the vigilante killers. When Harry, who had thought Charlie was the killer, figures it out, they confront him in his apartment's basement parking garage and invite him to join their organization. After he refuses, they try to kill him by putting a bomb in his mailbox. The twist comes when Harry and the audience find out that Briggs has actually organized the vigilante force and serves as their mentor. For the first time in his career, Briggs pulls his gun out of his holster, aims it at Harry, and forces him to drive to a spot where Briggs will execute him. On the way, the two debate whether it is better to work within the law and serve a system you hate or to work above and beyond the law and let history justify your vigilantism. Harry takes the side of the law, but before the credits roll he kills the rookies and Briggs. As Deborah Allison astutely points out, Harry's actions at the conclusion of the film illustrate a discrepancy between the character's words and actions that can be traced to the contradictory motives of the project's producers. According to Allison, "a disunion is proposed between the activities of the vigilantes and Callahan's own approach to dispensing justice. Through this strategy, the film attempts to pander to liberal critics even while it delivers the violent spectacle so foundational to the pleasures of the action genre" (19). In other words, as she

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puts it in her title, the producers sought to court the critics while assuring the audience. The popularity of the Callahan character with audiences results from "right-wing sympathies" that inevitably clash "with the dominantly left-leaning positions taken by the movie's most outspoken critics" (18). Thus "the film's strained tolerance of liberal ideals" is undermined by "the dramatic requirements of the action genre" that require Harry to kill the vigilantes (spectacularly) rather than arresting them and processing them through the system (20). Allison adds that Warners' promotional campaign centered around the icon of Harry's gun (as does the credit sequence), and "this fetishism of weaponry runs deeper than all the film's liberal dialogue and clearly speaks of the gun and its associated capabilities and attitudes as the element identified as being of the most appeal to the target audience" (21). Magnum Force therefore still privileges masculine practical action over effete theorizing and articulates conservative hostility toward court decisions such as Escobedo and Miranda. When Ricca walks out of the courthouse, an aggressively malicious mob spills across police barricades and makes it nearly impossible for him and his cronies to get into their car. The crowd is furious to the point of swearing on the local news. One man shouts into the microphone of the reporter interviewing him: "You know what I think? I'll tell you what I think! Fuck the courts, that's what I think! They've already wasted too goddamn much time worrying about the rights of killers! And Ricca, you're a killer." These passions are meant to express the outrage the audience feels toward the judiciary, which has, from their perspective, tipped the balance of power in favor of criminals. However, instead of feeding this ire without reservation, as the film Dirty Harry arguably did, Magnum Force gestures toward tempering it. The film attempts to accomplish this by first connecting the fury of the mob to the vigilante killings and the vigilante killings to the malfunctioning courts. After this setup, the audience waits to take its cue from Harry Callahan. The scene outside the courthouse cuts to the interior of the first traffic cop's apartment, where he is watching the events unfold on his television. He clicks off the set, puts on his holster, and shoots Ricca and his entourage in the next scene. By linking these scenes with such fluidity, Post shows the vigilante's action against the freed Ricca to be an outgrowth of the crowd's, and the audience's, outrage. At the crime scene, Briggs' initial reaction is to comment that somebody saved the taxpayers a lot of money, an obvious reference to a court trial that recalls the original film's scene in the District Attorney's office. Later at the morgue, where the latest criminal casualties lay on slabs, a police officer states without affect that "Someone's trying to put the courts out of business." Thus, according to the logic of the film, the liberalized courts create, as Nixon put it, "barbed wire legalisms" that protect criminals and shield them from punishment. This creates an enraged populace from which vigilantes arise to restore to the forces of law and order a balance of power. Magnum Force indulges populist outrage against the courts while attempting to take up the issue of whether or not the vigilantes' actions are justifiable. This is the point at which Harry Callahan serves as the audience's moral compass. The Magnum Force version of Harry Callahan is much less monastic than the "St. Cop" of Dirty Harry. Harry has a friend and seems to have a rapport with children. He drinks beer – Schlitz out of a can because Harry is, after all, a working-class hero – and he has sex with his neighbor. Although the audience has always identified with the character, this humanized Harry makes him even more accessible, and any barriers between hero and audience are eradicated in this sequel. Thus when the vigilante rookies confront Harry in the parking garage beneath his apartment building, they also confront the audience. Harry and the audience come face to face with what they themselves are capable of becoming. The scene plays as if it comes straight out of the pages of Joseph Campbell: the hero descends into his innermost cave, the dark recesses of his

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mind, and confronts the most monstrous aspect of his being. These murderous vigilantes represent the messy, overflowing, chaotic wrath of the mob given pristine form. They stand measured and neat, their anger contained and focused, their voices icily rational:

Vigilante Cop: We are the first generation that's learned to fight. We're simply ridding society of killers that would be caught and sentenced anyway if our courts worked properly. We began with the criminals that the people know so that our actions would be understood. It's not just a question of whether or not to use violence. There simply is no other way, Inspector. You of all people should understand that.

Another Cop: Either you're for us or you're against us.

Harry: I'm afraid you've misjudged me.

Although Harry's extralegal actions against Scorpio were partly legitimized by the ticking time bomb scenario, which is still a favorite right-wing plot (and rhetorical) device, Post has Harry backing away from his anti-system inclinations and denouncing actions taken outside the bounds of the law. Obviously affected by the criticism of the first film, the filmmakers (Eastwood owns the production company behind this film, too) use dialogue to indicate to the audience that they want them to back away from the brink and denounce vigilantism along with Harry. Magnum Force argues verbally that righteous anger has its place, but self-righteousness of the "Either you're for us or against us" variety is inevitably dangerous, for it gives one the sense of being above the ,8 which is fascistic. Briggs represents this fascistic point of view. Interestingly, Post gives the character some Nixonian flourishes. For example, he promises television reporters that there will be "law and order," and he conspicuously wears an American flag pin on his lapel. Elizabeth Drew notes that in 1968 Nixon campaigned chiefly on "law and order," and after his inauguration, Nixon "appropriated patriotism" by wearing small flag pins in the lapels of his suits. He ordered his staff to don the flags as well, and Drew asserts that the pins were one of the president's legacies (22, 33). This is not to say that Magnum Force calls Nixon a fascist, or a vigilante, but these allusions to the president's style do indicate some unease with Dirty Harry's Silent Majority rallying against the judiciary. In an attempt to set things right, the filmmakers stage a scene in which Harry denounces acting beyond the bounds set by the judiciary:

Harry: What I can't understand is, why you of all people?

Briggs: A hundred years ago in this city, people did the same thing. History justified the vigilantes, we're no different. Anyone who threatens the security of the people will be executed. Evil for evil, Harry. Retribution.

Harry: That's just fine. But how does murder fit in? You know, when police start becoming their own executioners, where's it gonna end, huh Briggs? Pretty soon you'll start executing people for jaywalking. And executing people for traffic violations. Then you end up executing your neighbor 'cause his dog pisses on your lawn.

8 This applies to both domestic and international law, since such self-righteousness could even lead to a so-called preventative war. 156

Briggs: There isn't one man we've killed that didn't deserve what was coming to him.

Harry: Yes, there is. Charlie McCoy.

Briggs: What would you have done?

Harry: I'd have upheld the law.

Briggs: What the hell do you know about the law? You're a great cop, Harry. You had a chance to join the team, but you'd rather stick with the system.

Harry: Briggs, I hate the goddamn system. But until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I'll stick with it.

Briggs: You're about to become extinct.

And with those words Harry Callahan states for the record that he has been misjudged, that he upholds the law and works within the system, even though he hates it. This by no means severs the ties between Harry Callahan and working-class social conservatives, however, as the Reagan quotation above clearly indicates. Post and Eastwood simply want to have it both ways: they feed their audience's frustration and outrage with the liberal judiciary that makes it easier for criminals to escape punishment and harder for the police to protect and serve. Then they pay lip service to reigning in the audience's passions and denouncing extralegal activities such as vigilantism when Harry makes it a point to declare his (grudging) loyalty to the system. Harry's spree at the conclusion of the movie ultimately underscores the truism that actions speak louder than words. The movie, like the audience, lacks internal consistency. Each insists on verbally denying the aspect of themselves capable of fascistic vigilantism that flouts the rule of law while happily indulging it via the orgy of spectacular death with which Magnum Force concludes. In real life, such internal contractions among key components of the conservative movement has been manifested in many ways. As I noted in the first chapter, Nixon's speechwriters crafted "law and order" addresses that simultaneously sought to appeal to Wallace supporters while distancing their candidate from the Alabaman and what he represented. Harwood's article that touted the rediscovery of working Americans concludes with a discussion of New Yorkers obsessed with law and order forming extralegal vigilante groups and armed citizens patrols. Perhaps most strikingly, the building tradesmen known for deploring street crime and venerating law and order took the law into their own hands when, in a fever of patriotic vigilantism, they viciously attacked war protestors in lower Manhattan, an event that I will discuss in detail in my fourth chapter. In the 21st century, America makes a mockery of its own ideals of the rule of law, habeas corpus, and a ban on torture in service of a its leaders tout as necessary to protect the American way of life. Magnum Force thus stands as an important artifact because of its flaws; its logical incoherence reflects internal contradictions within the conservative movement in particular and American culture in general, an incoherence that is also reflected in Death Wish.

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Urban Cowboy (Novel) Brian Garfield's Death Wish, published in 1972 amidst the backlash against liberalism, offers another tale of urban crime and the limits of the legal system to deal with it effectively. Garfield tells the story of Paul Benjamin, a successful accountant and liberal secular humanist, whose wife and grown daughter are viciously attacked inside the Benjamins' apartment. The three perpetrators were likely teenage junkies, and they flew into a rage when they discovered that their victims had only a few dollars between them. Garfield does not narrate the attack; the reader learns the unclear details along with Paul based on what the police were able to ascertain. The author does make it a point to convey that the women were not raped, but they were savagely beaten. Esther, Paul's wife, dies from her injuries while their daughter, Carol, physically survives but slips deeper and deeper into amnesiac catatonia. Carol had been an activist in college and subscribed to anti-Establishment feelings. Her husband, Jack Tobey, had a similar collegiate experience and rode his zeal for reform to Columbia law school and a job at Legal Aid, where he defends the types of teenage miscreants who brutalized Esther and Carol. An early sign that Paul is abandoning his liberalism comes when he attacks Jack for the work he does and for not having resigned and put in for a post with the District Attorney's office. As Carol's condition worsens, Paul's rage increases and he reconsiders all of his liberal beliefs. Then he buys a roll of quarters and puts it into a . After an evening of solitary drinking in a bar, he uses his weapon to wallop a mugger. Paul continues to transform as he carefully watches old westerns on television. He comes to believe that history teaches that one has to fight, and that the only match for a gun is one of your own. His metamorphosis is expedited by a business trip to Tucson, where Garfield brings the western theme of the novel to the forefront. Paul embraces the town's notion of western heroism, and he becomes invigorated to the point of having sex with a woman and buying a gun. Potently reborn, Paul returns home a vigilante. With each downturn in Carol's condition, Paul channels his rage into killing violent criminals. He conceptualizes himself as the first member of the Resistance, an underground soldier waging war. As he intensifies his clandestine campaign, the mysterious vigilante becomes a media sensation. Police officers publicly applaud his actions, and vigilantism spreads throughout the city. New York magazine publishes a remarkably spot-on psychological profile of the vigilante, and Paul fears that he will soon be discovered. He accordingly mixes up his routine and goes into a different neighborhood. There he shoots three criminals and is confronted by a beat cop. The officer signals to him that he is letting him go, and the novel ends with Paul walking away, hailing a cab, and going home. Death Wish represents a continuation of the logic and themes of the original Dirty Harry, especially its veneration of the police and its assessment of the negative impact of liberalism. As Paul and Jack wait in the hospital lobby for news about the state of their family, Joe Charles, "a cop with a tough black face," sits with them just in case he can be of any assistance (24). The Charles character serves two purposes for Garfield. First, however much it irked Scammon and Wattenberg, the authors of The Real Majority, the crime issue had been racialized in the American mind. As a result, any novel of the time dealing with crime and the vigilante execution of street criminals would be susceptible to charges of racism. This is especially true in the case of Death Wish since Carol and Esther were attacked by two Puerto Ricans and a black, or, as Lieutenant Briggs (apparently Briggs is a really good name for fictional Lieutenants) explains of the third assailant, "Of course he may have been a black Puerto Rican—there are quite a few of them" (71). Later, the author of the New York piece on the vigilante notes that only two of his

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five victims had been black. These statistics, coupled with Garfield's inclusion of an African American police officer, preempts accusations that he set out to write a racist screed. Secondly, Officer Charles stands as the epitome of a law enforcement professional, which enables Garfield to express the ongoing conservative backlash against war protestors and hippies who vilified the police. Although the author describes Charles' face as tough and his manner of speech as impersonal, "you could feel his compassion" (28). Lieutenant Briggs receives similar praise from Jack, who watched him coax information from Carol: "I was pleased how gentle he was in his questioning. He managed to get things out of her that I couldn't. A real professional—I wish there were more like that guy" (41). Jack's wish indicates that he is still in the midst of reevaluating his stance on the police; he hovers between his anti-establishment campus radicalism and full-fledged respect for officers of the law. Later, remembering Officer Charles with Paul, he acknowledges that Charles is "a human being. He does care, Pop. Some of them are corrupt and some of them don't give a shit, but the cops aren't really the pigs we made them out to be in college" (50). Garfield strongly implies that the attitude of campus radicals toward police officers during the Sixties was the result of their elite isolation from the realities of violent crime that combined with a willingness to indulge in dehumanizing stereotyping. The theme of the evolving attitude of youth toward police authority continues later in the novel when Paul lunches with George Eng, a wealthy liberal who has employed the services of Paul's firm (185). Eng describes his own formerly anti-police children as "pro-cop with a vengeance" and asserts that these days "The kids want law and order even more than we do" (190), a change of heart elicited after junkie muggers invaded their enclaves of safe streets and private schools. Eng also speculates the vigilante is probably a police officer fed up with the upper echelons of the bureaucracy and judiciary: "I've got a sneaking suspicion he's probably a cop himself—fed up with revolving-door courts and the red-tape delirium and the God-damned Supreme Court. I'd lay pretty big odds on that—he's a cop" (190). Although Eng was obviously wrong about the vigilante being a cop, the police did publicly support the vigilante's actions, and at the end of the novel an officer intentionally lets Paul get away (214, 223). Garfield uses Eng's harangue about the judiciary to argue that even limousine liberals had turned against the very system that they were instrumental in creating, a system that, as Dirty Harry also contends, makes the police's task of protecting the innocents nearly impossible. Death Wish constructs a version of liberalism without distinctions and nuances. For example, from the novel's point of view there is no discernable difference between a Justice ruling in favor of Miranda (the person) and a campus radical who refers to the police as "pigs" and denigrates soldiers serving in Vietnam. Within this framework, the Justice and the radical are both part of an elite cadre corrupting America by undermining law and order. The police in Death Wish are members of the working-class bound by red tape, spat upon by hippies, and forced into an alliance with a vigilante in order to better protect and serve. Within this logic, to be a liberal was to be an out of touch, elitist, pro-criminal snob who vilified police forces and looked down upon the working-class that fills their ranks. This presentation of liberalism fit right into the GOP's scheme to siphon the working class from the New Deal coalition and into their New Majority, and it continues to serve as talking points on conservative talk radio. Paul Benjamin is by no means a member of the working class. He represents the well-to- do Eastern elite, the type who would have concurred with Pauline Kael's assessment of Dirty Harry. Paul's friend and coworker, Sam, needles him early in the novel for his "lunatic extreme of liberal goodness," and calls him a "God damned bleeding-heart." Sam, a practical Midwesterner transplanted to New York from Minnesota, finds Paul and Esther baffling: "You

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and Esther actually go out into the wilderness and do things. Look at those hideous pinholes in your lapel—what was that, your Lindsay campaign button or your Support Prison Reform badge?" (11-12). Sam's rant indicates that Paul supported Lindsay during the mayor's contentious run for reelection, an election defined by a backlash against the mayor's liberalism, including his stand against police brutality and his role in the Kerner Commission (please see the first chapter for a discussion of the campaign). To Sam and other conservatives, Paul and Mayor Lindsay, because they stand for the rights of criminals and prisoners, do indeed represent the "lunatic extreme" of liberalism, a system of thought that Garfield contends cannot be sustained when one suffers real violence. Indeed, with Paul's awakening occurring as it does after his family is attacked, Death Wish presents liberalism as an unrealistic point of view that can only be maintained in a safely ensconced bubble. The loss of his family forces Paul into a reevaluation of his belief system, and his diction indicates his changing worldview. At the hospital, Paul takes a step away from humanizing criminals when he spouts to Jack that "There ought to be some way to get these animals off the streets before they can have a chance to do things like this." Jack still engages Paul liberal to liberal, and replies by fretting that it would be impossible to treat all the junkies on the streets with so much of the budget going to defense spending (30). The terms Paul uses after the funeral to refer to the predators make explicit his break from his previous point of view. When his son-in-law argues that the killing was not premeditated, and that he does not believe that anybody kills with their hands unless "angry or drugged to the point of irresponsibility," Paul becomes blind with rage and interrogates Jack about how he would defend them, mimicking, "Your Honor, they didn't know what they were—" Jack cuts him off and counters that he knows perfectly well that the perpetrators are guilty of Murder One, but Paul accuses Jack of merely placating him: "Don't humor me. I've seen you in court trying to make innocent victims out of your slimy guilty little clients" (44). As their back and forth continues, Paul rails against the liberal judiciary: "Do you think your fine neat pigeonholes of legal technicality can explain away all this? Do you really think these savages deserve all that complicated fine print?" In a grim foreshadowing of what the novel holds in store, Paul argues that the assailants should be hunted down "like mad dogs" and shot on sight because of the prison system's revolving door, made possible by "well-meaning bastards" like Jack (45). This is the point at which Paul asks Jack why he has not reconsidered the impact of the work he does "defending these filthy little monsters" and why he has not applied to work for the District Attorney. Jack falls back on the common reply that the issue is not that simple, and Paul answers with another step away from liberal doctrine, "Isn't that maybe our biggest failing? Copping-out with the complaint that it's not all that simple? By God maybe it is all that simple and we just don't have the guts to face it!" In another foreshadowing, Jack replies by asking if Paul wants to strap on "a pair of cowboy six guns and go out there and gun them down," and Paul acknowledges that he does (46). Paul's use of the terms slimy, savages, mad dogs, and monsters indicates the extent to which he refuses to recognize the possibility of any humanity in the criminals who attacked his family. As Terence Martin points out, use of the word they suggests an easily stereotyped group indistinguishable from one another, while use of terms such as animals and savages make "revenge all the easier to justify" (4). Of course it would take somebody with a kind of Christ consciousness for a person in Paul's position to ponder the ways in which the perpetrators had been victims of some combination of deprivation, mental illness, and social injustice. However, my contention is that Garfield not only shows Paul's violent impulses to be the result of the

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attacks on his family; he uses the attacks and the subsequent transformation of Paul's worldview to stress that his hero's previous liberalism had been the result of his cozy, cloistered life. By this logic, the novel makes the point that liberalism is at odds with the reality of the world. Garfield stresses this point as Paul reflects on the sheltered existence he has led in the city. He realizes that he had never seen real violence except via television and movie screens, and he had even held the suspicion that many of the tales of urban violence were perpetuated by men intent on assuring themselves of their own machismo, that they inhabited a tough world. He lived in the world's "Sin Capital," but he had never witnessed vice or corruption, or seen a bookie or known a gangster. He knew of drugs and lived in the vicinity of what was known as Needle Park, and he had seen junkies, but he had never seen a drug transaction or a needle outside of a doctor's office. Paul reflects on being occasionally unnerved by packs of laughing teenagers, but he had sometimes speculated that the city tabloids were filled with more pulp fiction than news. He also knew people who had been burglarized, and even Carol had had her purse snatched once, but these were anonymous crimes. What happened to his family was personal, and his bubble had been burst. "Now he had to get used to an entire new universe of reality" (62-63). Paul's new reality changes him from a person who sees the potential in everyone to one flirting seriously with a harrowing misanthropy. This is a point in the novel that gives credence to Garfield's claim in an interview with Fred Blosser that his work "was supposed to be a cautionary tale" (40). The author explains that the genesis for Death Wish "was a gut reaction" to a vandal slashing to ribbons the top of his convertible in the dead of winter. As he drove home, "the colder I got the madder I got. My ongoing thought was, 'Boy, if I'd had a gun—" He adds that during his drive, "it occurred to me that it would be possible for someone to get that mad and stay mad," but by the time he was home he realized that "it's normal to get mad but it's also normal to get over it – the vandal hadn't done me any permanent harm. It occurred to me that someone who got that furious and stayed in that state of rage would go from justification to madness" (40). Garfield indicates that Paul stands in the blurry area between justification and madness when his own thoughts start to scare him. Spying a woman reading a venereal disease poster, Paul is alarmed to find himself thinking of her as "a primitive woman" and "an ancient slut" before wondering "How many killers had sprung from her loins? How many muggers had lain between her ancient yielding thighs?" (66-67). In a park he finds himself unwilling to give money to disabled beggars, and surveying the extensive garbage littering the area, "the leavings of callous humanity," he thinks back to a summer he spent volunteering tirelessly for an anti- litter campaign. He hears himself thinking, "All right, they've been told, they've had their chance" (76). This ominous but vague threat becomes clearer one day on the subway during rush hour when Paul counts and looks carefully into the faces of fifty-eight faces before deeming seven worthy of survival. The rest he denigrates with dehumanizing phrases such as "bees in a hive" and "cattle being prodded up a chute." In his mind, he advocates exterminating them, and he admits that he should have been, despite his Jewish ethnicity, a Nazi (106-07). Garfield's depiction of Paul Benjamin's lengthy larva stage makes Death Wish an interesting read. Paul will think something truly disturbing, and just as the horror is elicited in the reader, Paul snaps out of his revelry and feels horrified, too. He might also look at a situation and see it from the perspective of a fascist, or he may remember how it would have looked from his formerly liberal vantage point. Frightened by a cluster of unruly teenagers, Paul considers how before his wife's murder, he probably would have realized their boredom and dedicated himself to the neighborhood athletic league. He even hears his former self saying, "What these kids need

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is an interest. We need to set up some ball teams. Now let's get a committee together and raise a little money for equipment" (88). These thoughts morph into a daydream about supplying teams of vicious teenagers weaponry disguised as baseballs and organizing games designed to annihilate gangs. Although uncomfortable with such thoughts, Paul indulges them (89). The more Paul Benjamin thinks about the liberal phase of his life, the more he questions the sincerity of his former motives. Despite Garfield's claim that his novel should be read as a cautionary tale, the following passages represent a trenchant critique of liberalism. Paul is not the only comfortable liberal in the novel, after all, to reject the worldview in favor of tough-on-crime social conservatism; George Eng changed his beliefs without having to suffer the trauma that Paul and his family do. One could perhaps read the story as a call to strike a sensible balance between the callow do-goodery of Paul's past and the deranged vigilantism he eventually embraces. Whatever his motive, Garfield articulates and, I argue, ultimately perpetuates the backlash against liberalism prominent during the time of the novel's publication. After Paul puts the roll of quarters into a sock and experiments with the makeshift weapon, he admits to himself that he was not in truth gentle; he was actually "a flabby coward" (68). On his first day back to work, Paul shares with his coworkers his recent reconsiderations, confessing that "It's not easy to realize that you just may have dedicated a good part of your life to a group of causes that turns out to be dead wrong" (82). At dinner with Sam and his wife, Adele, Paul argues that liberalism is the result of naïveté: "We're all born into this society congenitally naïve, you know. And those of us who don't outgrow it become the liberals" (84). Then, in a rant that combines his feelings of ineffectualness with an interrogation of his old liberal motives, Paul tells his hosts:

"It came to me a little while ago what we really are, we liberals. We demand reforms, we want to improve the situation of the underprivileged—why? To make them better off materially? Nuts. It's only to make ourselves feel less guilty. We rend our garments, we're eager to show how willing we are to accept any outrageous demand so long as it's black, or youthful, or put by someone who thinks he's got a grievance. We want to appease everybody—you know what a liberal is? A liberal is a guy who walks out of the room when the fight starts." (85)

With Paul's diatribe, Garfield gives literal form to the conservative movement's charge that liberalism is an ideology of the well-off designed to assuage any misgivings they have about their good fortune. Furthermore, Paul asserts that liberalism is rooted in insincerity and allied with the black, the young, and any other group that feels as though they have been marginalized. In other words, liberalism aligns itself against what Scammon and Wattenberg would call the "Real Majority," the socially conservative Middle Americans, out of naiveté and guilt. And of course the word appease is particularly loaded. Staying true to what has become its connotations, Paul contends that liberals are not peaceful; they are merely cowards. He argues that they make virtues of their failures, meaning that they walk out of the room when the fight starts and then laud the moral superiority of their nonviolent stance. As Paul's transformation nears its completion, he goes to a bar and listens, in a scene straight out of Pete Hamill's "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class," to a loud-mouthed working-class bigot fulminating against politicians who do not care about white working-class children, blacks on welfare, how tired he is of hearing "that three-hundred-years-slavery number," and the riots (109-10). Paul thinks about how a month ago he would have engaged the

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man in the "it wasn't that simple, wasn't that cut-and-dried" discussion, but now he finds himself thinking that the man may be right (111). The implication is not that Paul buys into the man's racial point of view, but that he agrees with his hard-line stance against the riots. Paul thinks to himself that "Permissive societies were like permissive parents: they produced hellish children" (111). For Paul, appeasement and permissiveness were all blending together into a swirl of riots, violent crime, and teenage street gangs. Later, after he has procured his handgun, Paul argues with Jack about the gun, knowing precisely the points to which his son-in-law will resort because he had argued those same points in his former life (129). In his reincarnation he is aligned with the gun crowd, and takes the side of shopkeepers who kill robbers (154). The character of Paul Benjamin reflects the American backlash against the sociological view of criminality, which Garfield depicts as on its wobbly last legs. Even the psychiatrist who analyzes the vigilante in New York magazine rejects the idea that crime is a disease to be treated, arguing that "the so-called humanitarian approaches have added greatly to the suffering of society as a whole" (204). He abandoned "the therapeutic approach to crime," and now argues that the end of the judicial system should be not to reform the criminal, but to "protect society by preventing and deterring certain types of misbehavior" (205). Through the character of Paul Benjamin and experts such as the New York psychiatrist, Garfield dramatizes the decline and death of the liberal approach to crime and lawlessness that Nixon stood against in his "Toward Freedom from Fear" paper four years before Death Wish's publication. Such renunciations of liberalism portend a return to an older set of beliefs regarding the issue, and Paul learns his lessons from a fading genre, the western. The night after his triumph with his roll of quarters in a sock, Paul watches a rerun of a long-cancelled "horse-opera series." The episode depicts cowboy gunslingers picking on and exploiting farmers until a drifting hero on horseback comes along and saves the day. Paul realizes for the first time why these stories were always so popular:

It was human history. As far back as you wanted to go, there were always men who tilled the soil and there were always men on horseback who wanted to exploit them and take everything away from them, and the hero of every myth was the hero who defended the farmers against the raiders on horseback, and the constant contradiction was that the hero himself was always a man on horseback. (121-22)

Paul's realization has conspicuous populist overtones, for the toilers, the ones who do the work and produce, have the fruits of their labor taken away from them by parasites on high horses. In other words, those at a higher station in life are leeching off of the workers. The contradiction of the hero being himself a man on horseback signifies Paul's realization of the necessity of violence and a renunciation of his ostensibly gentle, genuinely ineffectual, former self. He takes from the story the moral that a virtuous person does not categorically abstain from violence; he learns instead that the virtuous person necessarily has to fight better than the marauders. This is why, Paul thinks to himself, there has never been a successful television show about Gandhi. One has to be willing to fight, and this is the lesson that the hero always teaches the farmers. And it based on this lesson that Paul decides to procure a gun of his own (122). Interestingly, the hero on horseback teaching the farmers to defend themselves against bandits comprises the basic plot of the 1960 western, The Magnificent Seven. One of the stars of the film, , would go on to star in the film adaptation of Death Wish, which

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features western themes similar to the novel. Also, Blosser notes in the setup to his interview with Garfield that the author "wrote some of the best westerns of the 1960s" (40), and Garfield himself explains in the piece that director had shot a series of "spaghetti westerns" in Spain and used Bronson as his lead (41). Bronson's casting in Death Wish functions for the audience in the same way that Clint Eastwood's casting does in the Dirty Harry pictures. Viewers are cued, at least on some level, to connect the ethos of the western to the urban crime thriller. The raiders and pillagers of the plains have morphed into the muggers and looters of the city, and the heroes on horseback have evolved into the rogue cop and nocturnal vigilante. Garfield, however, contends that he put in such western references to make the point that the story of the hero standing up for the farmers is "extremely attractive as a fantasy, it's a terrific legend that makes great stories, but it doesn't necessarily provide a good blueprint for action" (Blosser 40). I argue that this message gets drowned out by Paul's scathing rebukes of liberalism and the fact that the basic story of the thieves on horseback living off of the labor of producers dovetails so well with the rhetoric of the conservative movement. As I discussed in my first chapter, self-styled conservative populists such as William Rusher worked to present liberals as effete elites who, with their universities and foundations, lived off of the real work of the producers, his term for an alliance of socially conservative laborers and economically conservative white collar workers who generate tangible goods and services and create wealth. In this conservative schema, the liberals are the non-producing bandits on horseback who steal from laborers via exorbitant taxes. The conservative movement, especially after their base shifted to the South and Southwest, presented themselves as the masculine heroes on horseback, and President Reagan's popularity undoubtedly came in part from his "rancher" image. He was often photographed wearing cowboy hats and riding horses, and when he was named Time's 1980 man of the year in their January 5, 1981 issue, the cover photograph depicted him as a -clad pensive rancher with a fantastic belt buckle. Garfield, apparently by accident rather than design, drew on the same western populist tropes as conservative activists to create another populist hero of social conservatism and to perpetuate the denigration of liberalism. Death Wish brings the western theme further into focus with Paul's business trip to Arizona. Before he leaves, Paul asks Jack if he could pull some strings with officials he knows in the District Attorney's office to get him a permit to carry a pistol in the city. Jack is hostile to the idea of Paul carrying a firearm, and during their discussion Paul likens muggings on subways to the old days when criminals held up stagecoaches (126). In contrast to New York, Tucson's attitude toward firearms appeals to Paul, as does their "hard-nosed fundamentalist attitude toward crime" (133). His embrace of the right-wing remains limited to crime, however. Garfield describes Paul's sojourn to "Goldwater country" and notes that he kept his contempt for their views on almost every other issue:

They supported free enterprise for the poor and socialized subsidies for the rich. They insisted on your right to die if you didn't have enough money to afford expensive private medical treatment. They saw Communists behind every bush and wanted to drop Nukes on Moscow and Peking. You had a right to good transportation if you had the price of a Cadillac; Tucson had no public transportation to speak of. (133)

Thus we see that Paul Benjamin represents people who gave up liberalism because of social issues such as crime but continued to maintain that the government has a role to play in such areas as providing healthcare and public transportation. He did not embrace laissez faire

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economics, and he seems to believe in with the Soviet Union and Communist China (133). In short, his politics come closer to matching those of Nixon than Goldwater. And with Nixon's willingness to compromise on economic issues in order to lure such social conservatives into his majority coalition, Paul Benjamin represents a type of voter likely to leave the New Deal coalition. Despite some political misgivings, Goldwater country agrees with Paul, and he further realizes his goal of shedding the skin of his flabby, ineffectual self when he wanders into a Tucson saloon and picks up a woman (147). The day after their night together, Paul goes to the sporting goods store he had made a mental note of and purchases a handgun (149). This intermingling of sex and violence recalls the night Paul whacked a mugger with the sock full of quarters. Afterward, his mood was elevated and he ate heartily and slept peacefully, and it occurred to him then that "he was experiencing all the symptoms of a sexual release" (118). By connecting Paul's transformation to sex and violence, Garfield links liberalism with emasculation and impotency. As Paul moves further beyond his liberal beliefs, he gets his mojo in working order and acquires the gun that has been sorely missing from his life. This phallic symbol signifies the cowboy virility he attains out West, and he returns to New York born anew. The portrayal of liberalism as emasculated, impotent, and even gay has been an integral part of the conservative movement's rhetoric over the years. On the one hand, there is the visual staging of conservative masculinity, such as the cowboy posturing of Reagan and the brush- clearing, flight suit swaggering of George W. Bush. On the other, there is the incessant impugning by conservative media figures of those they consider to be liberal. One can turn to many addresses of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference for examples. 's keynote speech on February 28, 2009 offers one. During his talk, Limbaugh presented his characterization of what he calls "The New Castrati," the castrated liberal who is a mainstay of his radio program. The New Castrati represents many so-called liberal points of view, including the beliefs that torture is an abomination and human beings are causing global warming. Two years before at the Conference, columnist used the word faggot in reference to former Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate , who is known to Limbaugh's audience as "The Breck Girl." Coulter also once referred to former Vice President as "a total fag," and she seems to be obsessed with former Democratic Congressman and Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's past as a ballerina.9 These are blatant and very recent examples, but they offer an indication of how cultural output such as Death Wish presents liberalism and masculinity in ways that coalesce with such presentations commonly put forth by members of the conservative movement. At home in New York, his liberal skin shed, Paul Benjamin stalks the streets as an armed paragon of masculinity. A socially conservative rebel, Paul thinks to himself how the city has "the look and feel of occupation: the walk up Broadway was a combat mission behind enemy lines," a thought that leads to his realization that "he was the first of the Resistance—the first soldier of the underground" (171). Paul's war has a preemptive element to it. Using himself as

9 The CPAC speeches are widely available on the web. For clips, a good place to start is the site www.mediamatters.org: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200902280021 and http://mediamatters.org/research/200703030002. For Coulter's use of variations of the word fag, please see http://mediamatters.org/research/200706250007. For Coulter's obsession with Emanuel's dancing, please see "Party of Rapist Proud to be Godless," June 14, 2006 and "To the Swift Go the Racist," May 14, 2008 on www.anncoulter.com. Finally, one can go to www.rushlimbaugh.com and search the terms "New Castrati" and "Breck Girl" for his most recent uses of these rhetorical devices.

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bait, he draws out and shoots junkie muggers to prevent "God knew how many future crimes from happening" (169). And as the psychiatrist who analyzes the vigilante for New York magazine understands, Paul is sending a message to the city: "He's saying to us it's wrong to throw up our hands and pretend nothing can be done about crime in the streets. He believes there is something we can do—and he believes he's showing us what it is" (202-03). In other words, Paul is the hero on horseback teaching the farmers that they have to be willing to fight. The analyst expects the message to take, and it does. By the end of the novel, victims of copycat vigilantes are turning up throughout the city, and Paul wonders if his work is done and conceives of himself as the cowboy in innumerable westerns who only wants to hang up his six- shooters (214). This is not an option, though, because the myth he has created for himself, a framework within which he plays the role of a hero, will not allow it. Garfield never uses the phrase "death wish" in the novel, but it becomes clear that the Paul Benjamin character possesses just that, and he is going to keep confronting violent criminals until it is granted, thereby fulfilling his role as a conservative martyr figure.

Urban Cowboy (Adaptation) The adaptation of Garfield's novel came out in the summer of 1974. Death Wish was a box office success, and with its prolonged life on home video and cable, it is a sure bet that more people have seen the movie than have read the book. It was probably with this expanded audience in mind that Winner made noteworthy changes to the story. For example, Paul Benjamin and his wife Esther were changed to Paul and Joanna Kersey, and when Joanna dies she has a conspicuously Christian funeral. Winner replaced the accounting firm of Ives, Gregson & Company with the Blue Ridge Corporation, for whom Paul works as a development engineer. Apparently watching Paul work at one of those big architectural drafting tables is more interesting than watching him crunch numbers, and this occupational change has an impact on the Arizona segment of the story. Finally, in contrast to the frumpy Esther with whom Paul coexists in an almost-platonic marriage, Joanna is vivacious and youthful, and the spark in her and Paul's marriage remains alive and well. Winner illustrates the Kerseys' chemistry via their vacation to Hawaii, where the movie opens. The first shots are of the surf, and then the camera pans to the right where Joanna emerges from the water. Paul is sitting on a blanket taking pictures of her. They kiss tenderly, and Joanna asks Paul if he wants to go back to the hotel. Paul suggests that they do it right there, but Joanna argues that they are "too civilized." He wistfully remembers aloud "when we weren't," but he gives in. This scene establishes the theme of civilization and how it relates to intermingled notions of sexuality and violence, and what is lost in the process of becoming civilized. Later the couple watches the sun set among palm trees. These images, when combined with the shots of the bright sun and pristine blue water of earlier, give the viewer an impression of paradise. Winner abruptly cuts to an image of an ominous red sun glaring over the concrete Babylonian hell of New York City, paradise lost. A jarring jazz fusion chord accentuates the sense of foreboding. The next shot features a graffitied train chugging on a decaying bridge over five lanes of gridlock. The camera pans out and down to a yellow cab sitting in the middle of the traffic. Inside the cab are the Kerseys, looking none too pleased to be back in – as Paul's boss, Ives, puts it – "the war zone," a reference to the fact that the criminals seem to be routing the forces of law and order. The film Death Wish does not venerate the police to the extent that the novel and Dirty Harry do, but the tone remains respectful. Joe Charles, the African American officer, exudes

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professionalism and compassion, and Winner presents Inspector Ochoa, assigned to track down the vigilante, as both skilled and dedicated. Lieutenant Briggs, although possessing all of these traits, approaches Joanna and Carol's case with a sense of realism bordering on resignation, and he conveys to Paul that there is only a chance of catching the perpetrators because "In the city, that's the way it is." Winner depicts the police as overwhelmed but not yet defeated, in need of a break to turn the tide in their favor. Thus, after weeks of the vigilante's campaign, the District Attorney and the Police Commissioner inform Ochoa that they want the vigilante stopped but not captured. The last thing they need is a public arrest and trial that turns him into a martyr figure. The officials, who are a lot less liberal and a lot more practical than those in Dirty Harry, are also covering the fact that the rate of weekly muggings has been cut in half because they do not want a spate of vigilantism, which would likely spiral the city into chaos. On the other hand, while wanting to stop an armed citizen from acting above the law, they are happy for the drop in street crime, and want criminals to believe that the vigilante still lurks in the city shadows for its deterrent effect. With that in mind, when Ochoa confronts Paul with his (Paul's) weapon at the end of the movie, he tells him to get a transfer to another city and he will drop the gun in the river. Death Wish depicts a world in which crime has reached the point where the police actually need the help of a vigilante and cannot alienate the public by bringing him to justice. In short, the police are overrun and compromised. Winner does not offer an artistic portrayal of the criminals overwhelming the city as the victims of deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice. The perpetrators of the crimes against Joanna and Carol are listed in the credits as Freak 1, Freak 2, and Spraycan, who distinguishes himself by spray painting everything in his path. Winner avoids the tact and decency that Garfield demonstrated when he omitted a detailed portrayal of the attack from his novel. The director, by contrast, pummels his audience with a graphic depiction of Joanna's beating and Carol's rape (there was no rape in the novel). The scene's explicitness was likely the catalyst for Winner's decision to change the racial make-up of the attackers to three whites. They almost certainly wanted to avoid charges of racism, and the muggers Paul shoots throughout the picture are both white and black, and most are on drugs. The Freaks act as though they are hopped up on amphetamines (Speed Freaks?), and they are never tracked down and brought to justice, which increases the bloodlust of Paul and the audience. Marty Gliserman likewise denounces Death Wish as "an act of aggression against the audience," and he notes its glaring lack of any consideration of "the context in which, and the process by which, criminality arises." He argues that the portrayal of the perpetrators "as animals who are dumb and inarticulate" should be read as a sign of their own victimization, but a victimization that "is far off the screen." Such a film, he suggests, would investigate the unjust workings of an "economic elite," but Death Wish instead stokes fears of attacks "from the lower social classes—fears of criminal assaults in the form of mugging, rape, and robbery." Thus, he contends, the film supports a "from the top down" version of class warfare: "while the film puts us in a position to identify with one victim, it allows us to strike back at another victim instead of those who create and maintain the oppression of both." Gliserman's admirably unfashionable ideas remind us that any discussion of the creation of criminality should necessarily stress the presence of an economic elite, which is to say, the actual elite made increasingly invisible by violent spectacles such as Death Wish and conservative populist rhetoric that smears liberals who advocate a sociological approach to criminality. Even before the attack on his family, an exploration of crime and criminality is not at the top of Paul's priority list. Upon his return to work, when Sam tells him of the fifteen murders that

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occurred during his first week of vacation and the twenty-one that occurred during the second, Paul responds only with a flat "That's a lot." As the conversation continues, the audience learns of Paul's liberalism:

Sam: You know, decent people are going to have to work here and live somewhere else.

Paul: By "decent people" you mean people who can afford to live somewhere else.

Sam: Oh, Christ! You are such a bleeding heart liberal, Paul.

Paul: My heart bleeds a little for the underprivileged, yeah.

Sam: The underprivileged are beating our goddamn brains out. You know what I say? Stick them in concentration camps. That's what I say.

This exchange exemplifies the depth with which the film examines the link between poverty and crime. It also displays the movie's gross lack of complexity. The two sides of the issue are bleeding heart liberalism and fascism, and nothing besides. There are no complicated in-between points of view. Upon his return from Arizona, Paul has adopted Sam's stance, the key differences being the substitution of the morgue for concentration camps and his willingness to take action rather than continuously run his mouth. Paul is sent to Arizona to work with Aimes Jainchill, a real estate mogul and gun enthusiast (say his first name out loud) who wears cowboy hats and western-styled leisure suits. Jainchill Realty Enterprises plans to build several houses on a stretch of desert and employs the services of the Blue Ridge Corporation to develop the land. Before they get to work, Jainchill takes Paul to the site, where they pass Judd, a rancher herding cattle. Jainchill explains his philosophy to Paul:

Jainchill: I wanted you to see this country before you looked at the drawings back at the office. Give you a better idea. I don't want to change these hills. Don't want to bulldoze them flat.

Paul: You'll waste a lot of building space.

J: (laughs) Wasting space. Now, those are some words that you big developers have got to change for something else.

P: Such as?

J: Well, space for life. Like old Judd up there. Space for people, horses, cows. I got funny ideas about building things.

Jainchill later adds, "I don't build a thing that's going to be a slum in 20 years, and I won't doze them hills. What I build conforms to the land. And you can't hear the toilets flush next door." With this conversation, Winner shows that Paul has a disrespect for nature, which he connects later to the character's longstanding disregard for his own inner masculine nature. This is also the

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point in the story where Death Wish nearly stumbles into a consideration of the impact of living conditions on the crime rate by suggesting that those who developed cramped New York indiscriminately bulldozed nature, failed to take space for actual living into account, and built buildings destined to degenerate into slums within a generation. The film declines to connect living conditions to criminality, though, because to do so would shed light on the economic elite who do their victimizing, as Gliserman puts it, "far off the screen." As if to make it clear that he refuses to indulge any complex analysis of the issue, Winner's next shot is literally of an old movie set with a noose hanging ominously in the foreground. At the set, which has become a tourist attraction, Paul and Aimes watch a performance about a gang of bank robbers and a stern Marshal, who tells them to get out of town "by sunset." Judging from the close-ups on Bronson's face, the play has the same profound impact on his character as watching the old "horse operas" had on Paul from the novel, especially when the marshal shoots and kills each of the criminals. Aimes, however unwittingly, further impresses Paul when he takes him to his gun club and puts forth his philosophy of gun ownership:

So goddamn much hoopla from the gun control people, half the nation's scared to even hold a gun! You know, like it was a snake, it was going to bite you or something. Hell, a gun is just a tool, like a hammer, or an ax.

As Aimes further explains, in Tucson guns are utilized as a tool to keep their streets safe; "Muggers operating out here, they just plain get their asses blown off," unlike New York, where handguns are illegal and the streets are dangerous. Obviously, this exchange serves to link liberal policies – in this case, gun control – to the rise in street crime. As the scene continues, Death Wish links liberalism to emasculation. When Aimes finds out that Paul was a conscientious objector during the , he speculates, "You're probably one of them knee-jerk liberals thinks us gun boys shoot our guns because it's an extension of our penises." Paul replies that he never thought of it that way, but admits he thinks it could be true. Aimes too admits that it could be true, and the idea does not bother him at all. After Paul hits a bull's eye with his first shot, he explains to a stunned Aimes that his father was a hunter, what out West they would call "a gunman," and his mother was "the other side of the coin," meaning she hated guns and was a pacifist. When his father was killed in a hunting accident ("some fool mistook him for a deer"), "my mother won the toss. I never touched a gun since." Then, just before he starts shooting more bull's eyes, he dramatically states, "I loved my father." The logic of this scene, which fits into the logical scheme of the movie, posits guns as masculine, or extensions of the penis, and the lack of a gun (for a man) as a state of emasculation. When Paul's father was killed, his mother "won the toss" and took away his guns, thereby emasculating him and turning him into a bleeding heart liberal and a conscientious objector. Here Winner slyly connects gun control and the rising crime rate with the antiwar movement, all of which exist under the rubric of liberalism. Thus, according to the movie, liberalism is an emasculated ideology, and Paul begins the film an emasculated bleeding heart liberal. He reconnects with his father, his masculine inner nature, by re-embracing guns in Arizona, and brings his rediscovered penis back to New York with him in the form of a handgun that Aimes slips into his luggage. Paul returns from out West transformed, his liberal skin shed for good. Aimes' gift to Paul is a Hogleg Colt that belonged to a Gunfighter named Candy Dan in

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1890, which continues the film's western theme. Ron Large's analysis of Death Wish, which is uncritical of its politics, focuses on how the film consciously draws on the frontier myth: "The West, seen as the wilderness, is the region of birth, the outside place, where the traveler may be as the redemptive hero" (233). Large also stresses that the Colt is for more than self- defense. "The gun," he argues, "signifies that Kersey is expected to do something. He is to accept its power and step onto the path of becoming the active agent of redemption rather than the passive recipient of evil" (235). His reading of Paul as a redeemer figure, and his use of the term evil, which he repeats when he stresses that "there is evil to be overcome, and the hero's return signifies the inevitable clash with sinfulness" (236), clearly indicate that he accepts Winner's work on its own essentialist terms. My focus is how Winner employs this mythology to illustrate Paul's reconnection with his masculine nature, which cinematically perpetuates the conservative construction of liberalism as weak and enervated. The film version also uses Jack, the liberal son-in-law, as a foil for the reborn Paul. After his vigilante campaign has begun, the two visit Carol in a sanitarium. Waiting for the train home, Jack suggests that if they had lived out in the country and worked in the city, they would not be in the situation they currently find themselves. Paul expresses disgust at this willingness to surrender the city to the criminals:

Paul: Nothing to do but cut and run, huh?

Jack: What else?

Paul: What about the old American social custom of self-defense? If the police don't defend us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves.

Jack: We're not pioneers anymore, Dad.

Paul: What are we, Jack?

Jack: What do you mean?

Paul: I mean if we're not pioneers, what have we become? What do you call people who, when they're faced with a condition of fear, do nothing about it, they just run and hide?

Jack: Civilized?

Paul: No.

Interestingly, the phrase "cut and run" would gain prominence among advocates of the War to describe pejoratively the stance of those favoring the withdrawal of American troops. This exchange also highlights the extent to which Jack has brought a pioneer spirit back to the urban East, and it recalls the "civilized" conversation of the opening scene with Paul and Joanna. Having the notion of being civilized relate here to violence, when it was introduced in the context of sex, further intertwines sexuality and violence and presents the potent Paul in stark contrast to his liberal and impotent son-in-law. As the "uncivilized" Paul continues his nocturnal killings, the mysterious vigilante

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becomes a media sensation and more and more people follow his example. Continuing the western motif, Paul has an issue of Harper's featuring a cover photograph of a noose over a traffic light with the caption "Frontier Justice in the Streets." On television, a reporter interviews an old lady who stopped a mugger by stabbing him with her hat pin, and another reporter talks to a member of a construction crew who, along with many of his coworkers, brutally beat a man they saw committing a mugging. Winner cuts to the beating, and the image of at least ten construction workers chasing down and beating a man with very long hair was likely meant to elicit fond memories of the Hardhat Riot of four years before (which I discuss in detail my fourth chapter). The rise of vigilantism indicates that Paul has taught the city to fight back; he represents the hero on horseback who shows the villagers how to protect themselves. Paul's western fantasy continues to his last act in New York, when he confronts a criminal and calls to him, "Fill your hand," a line spoken by conservative icon John Wayne in the film True Grit. This allusion, combined with other elements of Death Wish, exemplifies how the western mythos, enthusiasm for guns, being tough on crime and staunchly pro-war, stand as essential tenets of the "masculine conservatism" that Republicans continue to use to marginalize liberals and appeal to working-class social conservatives. This is not to say that Death Wish functions as a Republican film, but its articulation of the backlash against liberalism surely helped the party in its quest to present liberals as weak and ineffectual. Perhaps this is why New York Times film critic Vincent Canby described Death Wish as "a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing." Canby notes the film's ability to arouse in its audience a primitive kind of anger, and he concludes with the assertion that Death Wish is "a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers." The movie must have really bothered him, for he wrote another article about it, "'Death Wish' Exploits Fear Irresponsibly," ten days later. In it, he laments that Death Wish "is on its way to becoming one of the big dumb hits of the summer season, which is depressing news but not terribly hard to understand." He attributes its success to its ability to arouse, and he compares the film to pornography. Canby describes the "lunatic cheers" that rocked the theatre every time Paul shot a criminal. This passage calls to mind Pauline Kael's description of an audience's reaction to Dirty Harry, and it indicates the difficulty of calling out demagoguery without leaving oneself open to charges of elitism. Consider this sentence: "For short-term fun it exploits very real fears and social problems and suggests simple-minded remedies by waving the American flag much in the fashion that former Vice President Agnew used to do." Death Wish does indeed exploit very real fears and social problems, and the solutions it posits are simplistic. Bringing the American flag into the discussion is a puzzling rhetorical move, though, because there is no literal flag-waving in the film. I suspect Canby refers here to the supposed "traditional values" that men like Aimes and allusions to John Wayne are designed to elicit. Whatever he meant, Canby undermines his main point, that Death Wish is exploitive and essentially pornographic, by calling attention away from it and effectively aligning the movie with patriotism. Thus, by the end of the article, we have an elite critic writing in what is perceived as a left-leaning newspaper bemoaning regular folks cheering the death of criminals in a patriotic movie. Of course name-dropping the disgraced Agnew is meant to strengthen his case, but it may in fact have highlighted the perception of Canby as a soft-on-crime liberal elitist who mocks traditional values and patriotism (please see the section on Agnew in my first chapter). Popular criticism of Dirty Harry and Death Wish indicates that as the backlash against liberalism spread beyond political discourse into cultural output, it became almost impossible to

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articulate the liberal point of view without coming across as effete and elitist, unrealistic about criminality, and even unpatriotic. This liberal crisis results from the Right having gained control of the vocabulary of populism and their successful shifting of the connotation of the word elite from the economic to the cultural. Within this conservative populist framework, audiences cheer action heroes such as Harry Callahan and Paul Benjamin/Kersey as they dispatch flatly constructed villains and further obscure the economic elite who create the conditions of misery and deprivation in which criminality thrives. If liberalism is to survive as a viable political stance, it must first return the populist lexicon to its rightful place within economics and expose the workings and far-reaching effects of the moneyed elite. A first step toward this end is the recognition of the symbiotic relationship between popular culture and the rhetoric of the conservative movement, a step I hope I have made with this chapter.

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY FRIEND

There's A Riot Going On The hardhats' march on New York's City Hall was set in motion by an expansion of the Vietnam War. On April 30, 1970, President Nixon announced that U.S. combat forces had begun bombing , which elicited a series of demonstrations on campuses across the country. At Kent State on May 4, the protests culminated in the National Guard shooting thirteen students, four fatally. In New York, Mayor John Lindsay ordered the flag at city hall to be flown at half-staff on Friday May 8 as part of a national day of remembrance for the slain students. There was also an anti-war demonstration scheduled for that day on Wall Street, near the construction site of the World Trade Center. According to New York Times reporter Homer Bigart's "War Foes Attacked by Construction Workers," hundreds of young protesters, mostly from , Hunter College, and area high schools, gathered at 7:30 in the morning at the corner of Broad and Wall Street to demonstrate against the war. All accounts indicate that the demonstration was peaceful until five minutes to noon, at which time "construction workers, most of them wearing brown and orange and yellow hard hats, descended on Wall Street from four directions." Bigart indicates that there were only 200 or so workers, but they were augmented by hundreds of others drawn into the advance by their chants of "All the Way, U.S.A." and "Love It or Leave It." The construction workers beat demonstrators with their , and they specifically sought out youths with the most hair. When they reached the Federal Hall National Memorial, the workers surged through a police line and planted American flags on the statue of George Washington. From there, according to Bigart, "the workers led a mob to City Hall, where an unidentified mailman went to the roof and raised the flag that Mayor Lindsay had ordered lowered to half staff for the slain students." When the flag went up, the crowd cheered wildly. Soon thereafter, an aide to the mayor went out on the roof and returned the flag to its position at half-mast. According to Bigart's account:

The mob reacted in fury. Workers vaulted the police barricades, surged across the tops of parked cars and past half a dozen mounted policemen. Fists flailing they stormed through the policemen guarding the barred front doors. Uncertain whether they could contain the mob, the police asked city officials to raise the flags.

Two plainclothes officers raised the flag, and as it went up the construction workers began singing the national anthem. One shouted to helmeted police officers to "get your helmets off," and seven of the fifteen stationed on the City Hall steps complied. At this time a group of workers charged across the street to Pace College because they were angered by a peace banner hanging from the roof. They made it to the top of the four story building, grabbed the offending symbol and brought it down to the street. They burned the peace banner while other workers smashed windows of the college's lobby and beat up some students. When it was over, workers had invaded the building twice, beating up students and smashing windows with clubs and crowbars. They also tore a Red Cross banner from the gates of Trinity Church and tried to tear down its Episcopal flag. The article offers a quotation from Trinity's

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unhappy rector, who said "This is senseless. I suppose they thought it was a Vietcong Flag." At the end of the day, seventy people were injured. Speculation quickly arose that the assault had been staged. A stock broker later said that he watched the melee through binoculars from his thirty-second floor Wall Street office, and he saw two men in gray suits and hats who appeared to be using hand motions to direct the workers. At Exchange Place, a partner at Lehman Brothers was grabbed and pushed against a telephone pole when he tried to protect a youth from a construction worker. A man who came to his aid was beaten and kicked by a group of workers yelling "Kill the Commie bastards." At the hospital, with his right eye swollen shut, a large welt on his head, and five marks on his back, the injured man said the police stood by and did not try to stop the assault on him. Weeks later, in "The Hard Hats," Newsweek added that "Where the men got their American flags and their professionally printed signs was also a question." Such paraphernalia does undercut the claim of spontaneity, but City Hall seemed to have been more concerned with the issue of the police complicity. According to reporter Martin Arnold, "City Hall and the Police Department received warnings yesterday morning that several hundred construction workers, organized into a band on Thursday, would attack peace demonstrators in lower Manhattan." The police responded to these claims by asserting that they had lacked the manpower to control the workers, and the Police Commissioner stated that the Police Department had "no reason to anticipate major violence or disorder." He also claimed that the first attacks happened "out of the immediate view and control of the police," and explained that because the commander of the small force at City Hall knew that he lacked the forces to prevent an invasion of the building, he recommended that they try to placate the workmen by putting the flag at full-staff. Contrary to the Commissioner's claim that they had no reason to anticipate violence, an assistant to the area's congressional representative said she had passed along to City Hall a tip that she received from a friend of hers: "He said that the workers were briefed by the shop stewards at the jobs to go and knock the heads of the kids who were protesting the Nixon-Kent thing." A construction worker, who spoke anonymously for fear of his life, said he called the police at 8:30 on the morning of the riot and warned that "construction workers are out for blood today, that construction jobs in lower Manhattan were going to be in on the bloodbath." The same worker also claimed that workmen were not only organized, they had been, in at least one case, offered by their contractors monetary bonuses to take time off from their work to "break some heads." He said the attack was organized via the construction workers' grapevine. They decided on Thursday that "all the workers from the World Trade Center, the U.S. Steel building and 2 Manhattan Plaza" had to go out Friday and, again, "break some heads." In a quotation that echoes the broker with binoculars, the worker said that the planning had been so thorough that at least twice "I turned around and happened to see men in business suits with color patches in their lapels—the color was the same on both men, and they were shouting orders to the workers." He also asserted that despite the warnings, the police did little to keep the construction workers "from smashing up the kids." The Washington Post picked up on the story in their Sunday edition. Reporter George Lardner, Jr. describes how Deputy Borough President Leonard N. Cohen accused the police of "gross negligence" because he and other bystanders repeatedly implored the police to stop the violence, "but they refused to do so." Cohen also said that he was prepared to contradict the commissioner's claim that the police were too badly outnumbered to squash the ruckus. He argued that the performance of the 150 officers who kept the construction workers from storming

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City Hall was "a contrast to their negligence in preventing the violence." While several eyewitnesses told reporters in the city about the two men in business suits who appeared to be directing the workers, Cohen told the Post that he did not notice them himself, but the attacks "did seem organized." An anonymous construction worker, apparently the same one cited in the previous articles, asserts here that even rank-and-file officers on the scene demonstrated their knowledge of the assault before the workers even got to the federal building. He claims that the officers were cheering on the construction workers, saying things such as "Give'em hell, boy" and "Give'em one for me." He also told of how at the Federal Hall Memorial "The police simply opened ranks and let them through. Some of the officers asked, 'Where are the fellas from the Twin Towers (a nearby construction job)?' All of a sudden, a couple hundred of them came marching up Broadway." When the workers left City Hall to storm Pace College, Cohen says that he shouted to an officer to send his men across the street. According to Cohen, he got no response, and other construction workers "were mingling with the police and some of them were laughing. The construction workers and the police had literally joined ranks." The workers resumed their demonstration in front of City Hall and, Cohen recalls, some "began to beat up kids, and very brutally" close to the steps. Although he "shrieked" to the police to step in, Cohen wired to Mayor Lindsay that the police "didn't do anything until some youths were very seriously hit." He reports that even then only a mere 15 to 20 of the 150 assembled worked to break up the fights. According to the anonymous construction worker, the workers' actions did not appear to be unpopular. He reports people from office buildings yelling and applauding, throwing ticker tape and shouting "Good job, men. It's about time." Late in the afternoon, somebody made a remark to a worker and tried to duck into a bank. A guard held the revolving door closed so he could not get refuge. The man was beaten and left on the sidewalk "a bloody mess." He also recalls office workers joining in the violence: "It was wild. All someone had to do was give a peace sign." As time passed, more information about the incident came to light. Reporter Maurice Carroll quotes Mayor John Lindsay who, in a statement calling for an investigation of the police force's performance, noted that antiwar demonstrators had taken the "highly provocative" steps of spitting on and cursing the flag in front of construction workers. Lindsay stated that although "that kind of verbal violence is almost as bad as physical violence," he firmly asserted that it gave no person "the right to take the law into their own hands." The article "After 'Bloody Friday,'" which appeared in the following Monday's Wall Street Journal, lists the number of workers stalking the financial district at three hundred, and describes many of them as carrying crowbars and lead pipes wrapped in American flags. This version of the story also has the workers converging on the students from four different directions, and it sets a scenario that makes plausible the "highly provocative" steps Lindsay described. According to the story, the police headed off the workers, and a thin line of officers separated the rival groups for a few minutes. Facing each other, the group of students chanted "Peace now" while the workers shouted back "Love it or leave it." The Journal states that the workers were "urged on" by businessmen watching the confrontation, and their ranks increased with the addition of office workers until they surged through the police line and placed the flags on the statue of George Washington. An insurance underwriter, clearly impressed, said "Wow, it was just like John Wayne taking Iwo Jima."

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The hardhat riot encapsulates the dynamics of the long wished for new conservative coalition. The working and business classes put aside their clashing economic interests and forged a coalition on a foundation of the Social Issue, in this case their specific version of patriotism against long-haired student demonstrators. To put it in the parlance of Millersburg, they took up arms against dirty hippies. To put it in Rusher's phrasing, the producers took a stand against the non-producers; the social and economic conservatives aligned against the verbalists of the cultural elite. As the Journal notes, there was a high degree of coordination among the construction workers, and they got a lot of support "from many members of the white-collar business community." The article describes how "a burly workman slugged a booing young girl in the jaw, knocking her into the gutter. A gray-haired man in a three-piece business suit rushed forward to shake his hand." Another troubling image is of a young male demonstrator who made the peace sign. Construction workers trapped him after a group of business men blocked his escape. The Silent Majority was no longer, if they ever were, silent. The anonymous construction worker from articles past said the workers were men he knew well. "They were nice, quiet guys until Friday. But I had to drag one fellow away from attacking several women. They became storm troopers." Such a description implies a combination of fascism and vigilantism that seems to have been a rising fear during this time. A New York Times editorial, "…Violence on the Right," argues that the riots "were a tragic reflection of the polarization brought by the Vietnam war, campus turbulence, racial tensions and an Administration-fostered mood of political repression." The editorial argues that the incident showed how "right-wing vigilantism finds in left-wing extremism an excuse for pushing aside constituted authority and enforcing its own brutal form of injustice." In other words, the right wing broke the law by taking it into their own hands, which is ironic because, as the Times puts it, "The building tradesmen, of course, are in the forefront of those who deplore crime in the street and the decay of law and order." The reason for their actions stemmed from long-simmering resentments: "The hardhats, long scornful of excesses by privileged longhairs on campus, were obviously delighted at the opportunity to pour out their hatred on the students and any who dared to raise a voice in their defense." One could argue that resentments stoked by Nixon had made the nonshouters shout, the law and order crowd break the law, and the non- demonstrators join in demonstrations. Pete Hamill, who warned of the incendiary potential of white workers the previous spring with his article "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class," probably felt compelled to offer his thoughts on the events of May 8th, which he did in his article entitled "Letter from the Fever Zone." In a somber tone, Hamill states that he remembers "writing an article for this magazine last year in which I tried to warn about the anger of the white working class," adding that he feared then that "the next round of rioting might be between people and people instead of between people and property." He stresses that he wrote what he did "before Nixon and Agnew started pandering to those people with an almost grim determination." Rather than approach this segment of the population with sympathy, as Hamill had advocated during the administration's first few months in power, "Nixon, and particularly Agnew, went after them in the ugliest way possible." Instead of appealing to the workers' fundamental decency, Hamill contends that "Agnew inflamed them. More than anyone else in the country, he appealed to their basest emotions, fanned their fears, flattered their prejudices." Hamill asserts that Nixon and Agnew could have used the power of the White House to guide them toward a point of view "where they could begin to understand some of the other people with whom they must share America," thereby fostering an understanding about democracy and

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"even their own children." Of course, that is not the rhetorical route Agnew took. The vice president instead talked about "separating rotten apples" and, according to Hamill, "invented a media conspiracy." Hamill places the blame for the riot squarely on the administration's shoulders. On the Wednesday before the full-blown melee, Hamill witnessed construction workers pelting demonstrators with beer cans, soda bottles, and clumps of asphalt. From his perspective, "Those construction workers were only doing what the Vice President had asked them to do." The inspector leading the police patrol that day declined to make any arrests, and referred to the marchers as "bums," which Hamill notes was the very term Nixon had used only days before. Hamill argues that with this precedent in place, construction workers felt free on Friday to come down from the girders

and beat demonstrators in the name of the United States. They came with the authority of the President and Vice-President, wrapped in the flag, acting as if it were Iwo Jima, knowing that the police would do nothing about it. They were Agnew's constituency all right, which accounts for the particularly vicious and cowardly way they went about beating people; there were few cases of one man fighting one other man with his hands; it was always five grown muscular men kicking and stomping 123-pound students.

Although he laments the fomentation of this "new American spirit," Hamill stresses that he does not sneer at the construction workers for their love of country, and he points out the war protesters did not win anybody to their side by waving Viet Cong flags. He also notes that the police, as a whole, are well-disciplined, "but at City Hall that day, they acted like the Southern police of the early 1960s, standing by and letting the poor rednecks do to the niggers what they couldn't risk doing themselves." With such accusations and images strewn throughout the piece, it is not likely that Nixon circulated this Hamill article among his staff as he had the one from April 1969. Still, one must imagine Nixon happy. The events of Kent State and lower Manhattan likely elicited in protesters at least some real trepidation, and now the Right was about to co-opt the technique of the mass rally and put it toward their own ends. On May 20, the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York staged a demonstration at noon across from City Hall to show "love of country and love and respect for our country's flag." Reporter Homer Bigart, this time in "Huge City Hall Rally Backs Nixon's Indochina Policy," describes the scene of helmeted construction workers marching under a sea of flags to show support for President Nixon and disdain for Mayor Lindsay and other opponents of the war. The crowd estimates ranged from 60,000 to 150,000, and the rally was described as noisy but peaceful. According to the Times, the workers had rallied almost every day since they confronted antiwar demonstrators on May 8, and this was the largest so far. Bigart offers a snapshot of "flags, fervent oratory, patriotic tunes and a river of yellow, red and blue hard hats moving down Broadway" plus "cascades of ticker tape in the financial district." Despite having been hanged in effigy, the object of impeachment , and nominated for Mayor of Hanoi and President of North Vietnam, Red China, and Russia, Mayor Lindsay praised the rally as a "spirited and orderly" exercise of one's right to protest. He congratulated its organizers and praised the performance of the 3,800 police on the scene. He also asked that workers be tolerant of others' right to demonstrate, "for this is the essence of the American way."

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Workers had actually been admonished by their leaders to control their tempers and not act "like roughnecks." Bigart reports that the vast majority avoided any display of aggression, but they did boo, hurl beer cans toward, and tried to break police barricades to get at a college student perched on a building making a peace sign at the marchers. Another college student told the reporter that he was scared by the demonstration: "If this is what the class struggle is all about, there's something wrong somewhere." Despite such apprehension about such right-winged displays by the working class, Peter J. Brennan, president of the Construction Trades Council said at the chief address, "History is being made here today because we are supporting the boys in Vietnam and President Nixon." Time magazine covered the rally, too, and the resulting article, "Workers' Woodstock," offers another illustration of their anthropologically-distanced fascination with America's working class. Like transfixed zoo gawkers, Time patronizingly describes "callused hands" gripping tiny flags, "weathered faces" from the "brawniest unions" shining with sweat in a display of patriotism and "muscular pride," and demonstrations of support for President Nixon and his Vietnam policies presented with a "crude and forceful clarity." The article also notes the rally's festive nature by presenting images of the blue, red, green and yellow hard hats mixing with the sea of American flags "in a kind of workers' Woodstock." Interestingly, if unsurprisingly, Time gives Mayor Lindsay the last word. The article asserts that "blue-collar workers are apparently discovering, as countless college students have found, that there is a certain satisfaction in the camaraderie of expressing feelings en masse and in catching the nation's attention." With this setup in place, the article concludes with Lindsay's congratulations and call for the workers to respect the right of other groups to peacefully demonstrate, and his aforementioned declaration that such actions are the essence of the American way. The New York Times, to their credit, interviewed blue-collar workers, businessmen, secretaries, and housewives and let them speak for themselves. Reporter Francis X. Cline quotes a fifty-year-old office worker who lost a son in Vietnam but knows that his son died for the right cause, "to keep America free and to avoid any taking over by Communists – atheistic Communists, by the way." He also shares his opinion that most college dissenters "are influenced by a few vile people," and if they do not like it here "all they have to do is move out." He also asserts that Mayor Lindsay "smudged" his son's name when he says that men who refuse to fight in the war are heroic: "then I presume by the same category that my son that was killed in Vietnam is a coward, the way he thinks." This is a point that writer John Coyne picks up on in Impudent Snobs when he asks how the workingman must feel, as his son dies in Vietnam, "to be told by John Lindsay and the university and media types that the kids sneaking off to Canada are the ones really deserving of respect" (139). In a passage that articulates the dichotomy between the idle, permissive elite and the productive, patriotic working-class that the conservative movement sought to construct and underscore, Coyne concludes by imagining such a man's turmoil: "Just what the hell sort of society is it, he wonders, in which an electrician's apprentice is held in lower esteem than a pot-smoking liberal arts major?" Clines' article also prints the feelings of a Brooklyn woman marching with her two babies, the youngest of which she saddled with the first and middle names of Richard Nixon. The lady proudly asserts that she is "part of the silent majority that's finally speaking—and in answer to the creeps and the bums that have been hollering and marching against the President." Her use of the terms "silent majority" and "bums" indicates the extent to which she carefully listened to her president. She also states that college students have been heard from enough, and she thinks they have gotten their viewpoints from the Communists who have tried to take over education. A

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foreman at the World Trade Center site picks up on the subject of college students. Although he does not think they are "absolutely wrong," and he says they are right about some (unspecified) things, "I feel they have been with the silver spoon in their mouth too long and somebody has to take a hand in this to stop them, because if not, the country will come to ruins." About a month after the rally, the New York Times Magazine ran a story on Joe Kelly, an elevator builder at the World Trade Center who had the honor of carrying a gold-fringed American flag while leading a contingent of his International Union of Elevator Constructors during the May 20 rally. According to reporter Richard Rogin, Kelly was at the flashpoint on May 8th. He describes being four or five rows back when war protesters and construction workers squared off. In Kelly's version, a protester – "he was no spring chicken, he was 40, 45 years old" – stationed up on the monument spit on an American flag. A construction worker climbed up and knocked the guy off before the crowd turned its attention to raising the flags to full-staff. Kelly defends the police's performance: "And they can say what they want about the New York Police Department, they coulda had the National Guard there with fixed bayonets and they would not have held the construction workers back then." (Of course, if the National Guard had opened fire, chances are they could have killed at least four of them.) Kelly says he found the protesters' chants to be "un-American," and he asserts with defiant pride that he and other such average construction workers are flag-wavers. In defense of his fellow tradesmen, Kelly stresses that on May 8, "there was as many of these antiwar demonstrators whacked by Wall Street and Broadway office-workers as there were by construction workers." He adds that "the white-collar-and-tie-man" was in on the action as much as the blue-collar men. The point of the piece is that Kelly is a prototypical member of the Silent Majority who describes himself as having reached his "boiling point." Although "not much of a shouter" (which of course puts him among Nixon's nonshouters), Kelly found himself no longer able to "sit back" and, for the first time in his life, he became a demonstrator. Kelly is certain that aside from the violence of that day, the vast majority of Americans are pleased with the stand he and his fellow workers took against the antiwar protesters: "And now they're standing up. The construction worker is only an image that's being used. The hardhat is being used to represent all of the silent majority." Twenty thousand construction workers marched (and beat up war protesters) in St. Louis to show support for Nixon and his Vietnam policies, and several hundred workers fought students conducting a peace rally at the University of Arizona. The article does not state this, but Joe Kelly puts a face to part of the New Deal coalition that the Democrats lost because of the Social Issue. Kelly casually mentions times during which he has been on strike, which indicates some remnant of economic . His social conservatism trumps this consciousness, though, and he finds himself at home in the Silent Majority with President Nixon as his spokesperson. Kelly voted for JFK in 1960, and although he still admires him, he indicates that he would not vote that way again. By 1964, he had turned toward the right and supported Goldwater. For mayor, he supported William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1965 and John Marchi in 1969. He hates Mayor Lindsay, who he asserts has turned New York into "welfare city" and panders to welfare recipients and the antiwar crowd to win a bid for the presidency. He admires John Wayne, Spiro Agnew, and Mayor Richard Daley. Kelly wishes New York could borrow the latter for six months so he could give the city a strong dose of law and order, which clearly indicates how he felt about the way the Chicago police handled the protests in the summer of 1968. Kelly encapsulates the mixture of patriotism, social conservatism, and racial anxiety that permeated the white working class and precipitated their embrace of the GOP. Echoing the

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woman from Brooklyn, he believes, as Rogin paraphrases, "a subversive conspiracy of teachers, influenced by foreign powers, is brainwashing the students to Communist beliefs." He suspects the students are merely dupes, and he advocates somehow weeding out the subversive teachers. Kelly is also distressed by hippies and their lifestyles, and he is enraged at campus radicals who burn buildings and shut down schools that his tax dollars built but he and other workers never had a chance to attend. He argues that a crime is a crime, even if committed in the name of social reform, and he is tired of the double standard of justice for student lawbreakers. His neighbors include a steam-fitter, a bus driver, a police officer, and others who have had it with peace protests, moratoriums, people bad-mouthing America, campus uprisings, bombings, Viet Cong flags waving in their city, long-haired youths, nudity, drugs, and un-Americanism. He is also against a black family moving into his neighborhood because he feels it would set off a frenzy of panic-selling, which he says would drive down the value of his home. Kelly typifies the Irish Catholic New Yorker Kevin Phillips kept his strategic eye on, the one susceptible, as Wallace may have put it, to an Alabama speech presented with a New York accent. Nixon's competition against Wallace for workers' support was assisted greatly when rally organizer Peter J. Brennan and twenty-two other union officials visited the White House on May 26. According to reporter Robert B. Semple, Jr., Nixon told the leaders that their public demonstrations in support for his Vietnam policy had been reassuring and "very meaningful" to him. Brennan presented Nixon with a small metal American flag pin, which he pinned to the president's lapel. Brennan also gave him a hardhat that read "Commander in Chief," and he read a statement indicating its meaning: "The hard hat will stand as a symbol, along with our great flag, for freedom and patriotism to our beloved country." He also left a second one, this one painted with four stars, to be presented to General Creighton W. Abrams, the commander in Vietnam. The article makes a point of noting that Nixon did not pose for photographs with his new hat on, and his press secretary later stressed that Nixon does not condone violence against any segment of society. This was obviously a crucial time during Nixon's, and the Republicans', attempt at establishing a new majority. Perlstein describes the strategic importance of the rallies and the union leaders' White House visit. Nixon knew that unless the GOP siphoned workers from the Democrats, he would fail to construct his majority coalition. "But to do so with ongoing economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – offended a more foundational Republican constituency: business" (498). Perlstein sums up the appeals to the hardhats as the first effort of its kind to turn the white working class, "via its aesthetic disgusts," against the Democrats. And even though economic conditions in 1970 were unhealthy, Nixon and his strategists were not worried. Perlstein cites a note Haldeman wrote to himself that sums up their overall plan: "Patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed" (498-99).

Middle American Resentment and the Erasure of the Real Elite Joe, directed by John G. Avildsen and starring Peter Boyle, tells the story of two middle- aged men from different socioeconomic classes joining forces to attack smug, drug-addled hippies. This tale of a socially-conservative, $4-an-hour factory worker from the Astoria section of Queens forging an alliance against longhairs with a $60,000 a year, Park Avenue-dwelling advertising executive had a particular resonance after the hardhats and stockbrokers teamed up to pummel student war protestors just two months before its July 1970 release. In a New York Times profile by Judy Klemesrud, Boyle states that production wrapped in February, "way before Kent

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State" and "the construction workers beating up on the kids on Wall Street." Boyle notes that although neither he nor any of the filmmakers "were prophetic—none of us knew that the hardhats were going to do what they did on Wall Street," he did realize as soon as he heard about the events of May 8 that "it was going to affect the way the movie was received." Years later, Avildsen told an interviewer that after the riots, "the term 'hard hat' was coined, and in July Joe opened with the quintessential hardhat. The timing couldn't have been better" (Emery 121). Indeed, as Derek Nystrom notes, "virtually every review of Joe described its protagonist as a hard hat" and "read the film as a piece of instant sociology" (23). The notion of "instant sociology" conjures images of cultural interpreters looking to Joe for answers to the most basic questions surrounding the hardhat riot: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? Cagin and Dray pointedly read the movie in the context of Kent State and the subsequent attacks on demonstrators in lower Manhattan; and while they do not trace a direct line of causality from these violent episodes back to the Nixon Administration, they do identify Joe as representative of "the inflamed climate" created by "Nixonian propaganda" (212). The authors contend that Nixon and Agnew's "calls for law and order became translated into jingoistic rightwing codes that made liberals out to be as 'soft on crime' as they were anti-American in their opposition to the war." In other words, "this deliberate confusion of criminals and protestors" conflated the issues of crime and the war and further polarized the nation (212). Cagin and Dray argue that Joe reflects "a very real spirit of confrontation between the counterculture and the , which finally—after years of retreat—rose up in the age of Nixon to fight back" (215). And, in a statement that applies equally to the final scenes of the film and the real life riots, they describe the "alliance between upper-middle-class expediency and lower-middle-class resentment" as an "unholy" one that ultimately boils over into violence against hippies (214). My own analysis of Joe also relies on the hardhat riots for context, and it focuses on how the film depicts the alliance between socially conservative blue collar workers and the economically conservative white collar class in a way that underscores the fault line at the core of the conservative movement, warns of the perils of a politics built on a foundation of seething anger and resentment, and dramatizes the successful erasure of the white power structure from mainstream political discourse. Despite his status as the title character, Joe Curran does not appear until about twenty- seven minutes into the movie. The title sequence focuses on Melissa Compton, a twenty-ish hippie from a privileged background, as she wanders around Manhattan. The credits conclude as she arrives at the tiny, squalid apartment in Greenwich Village that she shares with her long- haired boyfriend, Frank Russo, an abusive heroin addict and painter. The couple has drugs strewn throughout their flat and an ironically placed American Legion bumper sticker on their wall that reads "Maintain Law and Order." After Frank leaves to sell vitamins that he plans to pass off as hard drugs "to teenyboppers," Melissa overdoses and ends up in a hospital where her parents, William and Joan Compton, are introduced. When William enters Melissa's apartment to retrieve her belongings, Frank returns with a shopping bag full of drugs that he plans to deal. The two engage in a vitriolic argument that ends with William losing control of himself and beating Frank to death. He retreats to the American Bar and Grill to pull himself together and meets Joe, who is drunkenly railing against "the niggers," welfare, social workers, the riots, inflation, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, liberals, drugs, sexual permissiveness, music, and hippies. Joe states that he would like to kill a hippie, and William affectlessly states that he just did. Joe reacts excitedly before William makes as though he had been merely kidding.

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The film then picks up the story of Joe Curran. Through television and newspaper reports of Frank's murder, Joe figures out that William had actually not been joking. He calls William at work and they arrange a meeting for that night. Joe assuages William's fear that he is out to blackmail him, stating that he only wants to commend him for his action, and the two men form an unlikely interclass friendship that results some days later in a painfully awkward evening at the Currans' house. The couples' dinner is crosscut with scenes of Melissa finding out what happened to Frank, escaping from the hospital, and being let into her parents' apartment. Upon their return home, Joan and William talk openly about the murder and Melissa overhears them. She confronts William about his crime and runs away into the hippie underground. A few days later, William and Joe go into Greenwich Village to find Melissa. When the opportunity presents itself, the old squares use the shopping bag of narcotics William took from Frank's apartment to "infiltrate" a group of hippies. Joe is obviously interested in sampling the drugs, and at his urging William and he get high and join the orgy that has started. The male hippies abscond with the sack of drugs and each of the older men's wallets, and Joe roughs up one of the young women until she gives up the location of their commune in the country. There Joe goes into his trunk and brings out two huge rifles. William is against taking in the firearms, but Joe insists he just wants to scare the kids and make a point. He succeeds in scaring the hippies who took his wallet, but upon getting it back and finding it empty he loses his temper and starts shooting. William turns his gun on Joe to put a stop the carnage, but Joe calmly replies that there is only one way out now, which is to kill everybody there. He argues that it could get to be fun, and he reminds William what guys like Frank did to his daughter. William then shoots two hippies and chases a third, who turns out to be Melissa, outside, and the movie concludes with the father unwittingly murdering his daughter. Joe depicts many of the era's cultural conflicts without privileging one side over another. This neutrality might be laudable in another film, but the problem here is that Avildsen presents nearly all the characters, and the aspects of society they are designed to portray, as falling somewhere between severely flawed and despicable. In other words, Joe builds its impartiality on a foundation of equal-opportunity scorn, which muddies the commendable point it makes about the perils of resentment-based alliances. The film offers a particularly negative representation of the younger generation that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory "children's crusade" platitudes of the major newsweeklies. Melissa Compton lacks the mean-spiritedness of Frank and others her age, but she comes across as dim-witted and weak-willed. In addition to his heroin habit and insolence, Frank is shown to lack any scruples or core decency and he exhibits a flagrant disregard for Melissa's well-being. His peers, the hippies William and Joe take up with and ultimately kill, behave as shallow, entitled brats. They make fun of Joe for his working-class appearance (they refer to him derisively as the "truck driver"), and they seem to stand for nothing but hedonism and thievery. As Joan Mellen eloquently put it two years after the film's release, "The counter-culture drop- outs in Joe were portrayed without ideas, lacking any rationale for their alienation from middle- class values. Their rebellion was presented as a cynical pretext, an excuse for license, usually sexual, and for an emotional and moral laziness" (26). Mellen reads Joe as the beginning of a film cycle that caricatures the youth culture by equating "physical degeneracy and incoherence" with dissidence to ensure that "the causes of discontent are studiously avoided" (26, 27). Put differently, in movies such as Joe the youthful rejection of middle-class values are presented as symptoms of deviancy and, more importantly, isolated from "a society in need of change" (26). Joe views the older generation from a similarly disdainful perspective. When William

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murders Frank, he appears to be acting outside of himself. The killing ironically epitomizes his ineffectualness; his loss of self-control makes the attack seem like something that is happening to him rather than something he is perpetrating. His silver, senatorial handsomeness coupled with his wide-eyed, trapped expression give the audience the impression that until now he has glided through life ensconced in the safety of his status. He admits that his job is easy and pointless, but even then his secretary has to pick up his slack. His hours away from the office are spent at martini meetings, athletic clubs, and cultural events. There are insinuations from Frank that William has problems with his wife, Joan, that have to do with his "balls," which probably means that she runs the household. This does not seem like it would be a major problem for a man like William, though, who seems to approach life from a place of passive complacency. Avildsen presents Joan as self-centered, stuck-up, and not exactly used to mingling with the commoners of the outer boroughs. She looks absurd in the Curran's living room in her fur , white gloves, and little black , and the evening plays more like a political stunt – not quite Cindy McCain at the 2008 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, but heading that way – than an evening among friends. Joe's wife, Mary Lou, by contrast, exudes genuine kindness and affection for her family, but these traits are overrun by her babbling frivolity. The anxiety she experiences from the youth-fueled cultural upheavals stems only from how old-fashioned "the kids" make her feel, and her worries about the integration of her neighborhood are soothed when she spies the moving van and concludes that the family has "nice furniture for colored." The Joe Curran character seems to have been crafted from the pages of Pete Hamill's "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class." Hamill depicted the white working class with familiar affection and drew in sympathetic detail the context in which their resentments simmered. Avildsen, by contrast, focuses more on the idea that the white working class of the time was, as Hamill put it, "on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt," and at times it appears that the director crafted his main character based on the "grotesque, demonized images of the rabble," that is, of "fat, ignorant and bigoted ethnics" that Hamill argues the phrase "White Lower Middle Class" elicits at swanky Upper East Side cocktail parties. Hamill composed his essay in hopes that his audience would disregard such caricatures, learn more about workers' backgrounds, and recognize the virtues, such as loyalty and endurance, that they possess. That Avildsen harbored such laudable ambitions is doubtful. Mellen suggests that the film cynically sought to attract the very student audience it denigrates by presenting "the working man as fascist" and "semi-human-being" (26). The director's depiction of Joe is indeed brutal. Still, he does eventually portray the misery of Joe's work as part of a day-in-the-life montage that builds some context around the character; and his racist tirade, which is the first the audience sees and hears of the title character, does recall the diatribes Hamill recounts hearing in working- class bars. That said, Joe's initial words, because of their jarring lack of context, seem designed to elicit the greatest shock value and to repulse viewers rather than to invite them to enter his world and consider recent cultural upheavals from his perspective. "The niggers," he declares by way of introduction in a close-up shot that opens the scene, "the niggers are getting all the money. Why work? You tell me, why the fuck work when you can screw, have babies, and get paid for it? Welfare. They got all that welfare money." This introduction effectively creates a gulf between the liberal-minded viewer and the character and replaces any chance of genuine empathy with detached voyeurism. It also, as I will show below, panders to the worst elements of people who harbor such resentments. Avildsen, who served as cinematographer as well as director, then cuts to a medium shot

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of Joe in profile sitting in a bar drinking that ever-reliable working-class signifier, Schlitz. After fulminations against social workers and their "nigger-loving" tendencies, Joe stays on the theme of work versus entitlements:

I sweat my balls off forty hours a week in front of a fucking furnace, and they get as much money as I do for nothing. They got 'em living in hotels at fifty dollars a day, a thousand dollars a month. Now they want charge accounts. Charge accounts. I ain't even been inside Macy's and they want charge accounts.

This grievance recalls the worker in the Hamill piece complaining about the alleged demand "they" were making for Korvette's credit cards, as does Joe's assertion that even though his kid "ain't dumb," he "couldn't get into college because they let the niggers in first." This claim fits into Joe's theory that connects college admissions to the riots. He argues that admitting black students to school is "how they're saving the cities. They keep the smart niggers busy wrecking the colleges." This particular idea meshes with Joe's grand conception of how the relationship between blacks and the Liberal Establishment works: "All you gotta do is act black and the money rolls in. Set fire to the cities, burn a few buildings, you get paid for it." More importantly, for our purposes, this scene emphasizes Joe's conception of himself as a Middle American, below the liberal ruling class in charge of welfare and college admissions but above African Americans he imagines as thriving listlessly on the dole. The scene is also useful because the Joe Curran character (caricature) represents the segment of the New Deal coalition that felt abandoned by their party when the Democrats turned their attention toward Civil Rights. With this extended drunken rant, Avildsen depicts a version of the racial resentment that made voters such as Joe the political prize for which Nixon and Wallace competed. It is also noteworthy that in his unquestioning acceptance of the American system, Joe would never ask why resources such as living wages and slots in colleges should be so limited that working-class whites and poor blacks would be forced into competition for them. Of course the notion of working-class blacks seems to be completely beyond the scope of Joe's worldview, and as a result so is any notion of the kind of trans-racial working-class alliance for which Hamill advocates. Joe articulates the same stringently uncomplicated, dualistic view of blacks that Hamill recounts white workers espousing: the welfare recipient and the militant. The former get paid for having babies; the latter burn buildings and foment campus unrest. Avildsen hints at the source of Joe's binary view when he cuts to him and Mary Lou eating in front of the television news as the anchor finishes his report on "black militants abroad," and he cleverly has Mary Lou (obliviously) undermine this duality by describing the middle-class nature of their new black neighbors with their "fancy bedroom suite" and kids who are "cute" and "clean." Mary Lou's descriptions, and the complications to Joe's racial worldview that they imply, fall on deaf ears. The resultant implication is that Joe will never recognize common ground with his new neighbors or any black citizens, and race will continue to serve as a wedge issue that drives apart the New Deal coalition and fuels white working-class animosity toward liberals. In addition to race, Joe illustrates that the acrimony he and his brethren feel toward liberals also stems from machismo. From his barstool ramblings on the subjects of riots and colleges, Joe lurches into a rant about the lack of respect the Chicago protestors showed for the President of the United States before making the claim, based on a supposed poll by "the Wallace people," that "forty-two percent of all liberals are queer." Such a belief, combined with

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his homophobia (he makes it a point to tell William "I ain't queer"), would preclude him from ever identifying himself as liberal, or even seriously considering a liberal perspective on a social issue. It would also, I imagine, enable him to take at face value the message of Death Wish and the rhetoric of the conservative movement, each of which, as I showed in Chapter Three, equates liberalism with emasculation and effeminacy. Joe also associates homosexuality with refinement, which sheds more light on what must be his conception of the Liberal Elite. When William takes him to where his "kind of animal hangs out," a posh bar filled with executives in suits, Joe comments that the patrons "look like a bunch of fags. Not really fags, but close, getting there." Screenwriter Norman Wexler did not craft a character with an extensive vocabulary who makes nuanced distinctions, so the viewer is left to discern that Joe means that the men look pampered and effete. Taking all of Joe's comments on "queers" and "fags" together, one can conclude that liberalism, effeminacy, elegance, and homosexuality churn slowly in the character's mind in a nebulous haze of stereotypes and resentment. Joe obsesses on other social issues as well. The social workers in the welfare offices are "nigger-lovers," as are "those goddamn nigger-loving hippies." In addition to his racial preoccupations, hippies serve as a focal point of Joe's class-based bitterness and his anxiety over the rise in sexual permissiveness:

The white kids. The rich white kids. The worst, hippies. Sugar tit all the way: the cars, the best colleges, vacations, orgies. Christmas, Easter. They go someplace, like a fancy resort, and have orgies. Easter orgies. The day Christ rose they're all screwing one another.

In another dig at Joe's lack of sophistication, he pronounces "orgies" with a hard g. His pronunciation also suggests that he either read about these supposed orgies or heard about them from a similarly limited friend or colleague. Whatever the source, he laments that the kids from the poor and middle-classes in the country are "all copying the rich kids. They're all going the same goddamn 'Screw America' way." Joe's inebriation and the context of his words make it unclear if by the "'Screw America' way" he means a lack of patriotism or that the United States was turning into a land of promiscuity. His hatred of peace marches, where "they're so whacked out on drugs they got to have candles to see where they're going," suggests that he could mean the former. Either way, blacks, welfare, rich kids, sexual permissiveness, war protestors, and hippies swirl in his mind in a simmering froth similar to that of liberalism, effeminacy, elegance, and homosexuality. Joe Curran represents, in short, a cauldron of white, working-class resentment just about to boil over into murder. Popular criticism assessing the film's representation of the working class varied. Judith Crist credits actor Peter Boyle for his humane approach to the character, arguing that "he brings to his portrait of a hard-hat mentality that soupcon of sensitivity that separates man from beast, making Joe the human being who walks among us rather than the monstrous stereotype we choose to think him." She adds that his performance gets to the essence "of a man our society molds, touching upon the oafishness, the gee-whiz attitude, the know-nothingness at the core and the know-it-all veneer." Mark Goodman also lauds Boyle's performance but argues that the movie overdraws the character, and he makes the point that Joe "does not need to burp every time he takes a swig of beer." Despite the tendency of all the characters to lapse into caricature, Goodman ultimately commends their realness and "the film's essential honesty." New York Times critic Howard Thompson, by contrast, ridicules the film for its lack of

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realism and conviction and denounces Joe as "an ape-like, dese-dem-and-dose type." Thompson further admonishes the film for its portrait of the hardhat, asserting that the film goes about "trussing him, roasting him interminably and stuffing an apple in his mouth." Penelope Gilliatt, writing in The New Yorker, goes even further in her criticism of the movie's portrayal of the white, working-class male, likening the caricature to egregiously insensitive movies that skewered blacks decades before:

In some curious way, the picture, because of its attitude toward Joe, is made to seem racist. He is traduced and patronized as the type of the hardhat worker as thoroughly as any Negro character was traduced and patronized in older movies. We learn about him generically, not idiosyncratically. We learn that his kind hate welfare, keep guns in the cellar, abuse the out-of-step, salute the flag, and make love as though manhood depended on getting it over with in two minutes. This seems about as true, and as untrue, as a study of a black that tells us he has a sense of rhythm and laughs a lot.

Gilliatt makes a strong case that the film goes too far in its ridicule of the (white) hardhat, but her assessment might read better if it were intended as an indictment of Joe's classicism rather than its racism. Still, as I discuss above, one should keep in mind that the movie shows contempt for each sociological category it presents, and its merits rests on its assertion that alliances based on a foundation of rage and resentment will end disastrously. Profiles of Peter Boyle indicate the extent to which he was disturbed by how this warning was lost on too many of the film's admirers in the general public. In an article in Life magazine the following autumn, Michael Durham describes Boyle's discomfort as "a little old lady" confided to him, "I agree with everything you said, young man. Someone should have said it a long time ago." Durham also relates Boyle's horror at overhearing one middle-aged man explain to another that Joe is "about a guy like me who's sick and tired of all this crap." A quarter century later, after being asked on National Public Radio if, after the release of Joe, people started to confide their prejudices in him, Boyle replied:

Yeah, they'd come up and say, "Hey, Joe, you know, you had the right idea about all those hippies. You know what we should do? We should put 'em in a big boat and take it out to the middle of the ocean and drop a nuclear bomb on it."

Mellen would likely blame such reactions on what she calls Joe's "caricature of the filthy, dirt- caked hippies" that "reinforces contempt among workingmen for idle, dissolute, privileged youth" (26). But despite being disturbed by the Joes in the audience who had a mirror held up to their prejudices and seemed to like what they saw, Boyle expressed his sympathetic take on Joe Curran to both the New York Times and Life. "He's a man," he told Judy Klemesrud, "who's really trapped. He doesn't like his job, his taxes are sky high, and his kids are causing him worry at home." Perhaps with some of the reviews I cited above in mind, Boyle added that "Sometimes I worry that maybe we were too hard on him." He could even make some sense of his character's racism, and in so doing struck a somewhat populist tone in the Life article:

I can understand a guy like Joe. He's got every penny he ever saved sunk into his house, and a black family is moving in on the same block. He doesn't really hate Negroes, but he

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feels threatened. It's a real problem that most liberals never encounter. These days you have to have money to be a liberal.

Boyle's appreciation of Joe's situation, however, did not extend to patience for the real life rioting hardhats, whose activism he found "scary" and comparable to "the brownshirts in Germany during the thirties." These remarks reflect Derek Nystrom's claim that critics who reviewed the film upon its release place responsibility for the climatic violence squarely on Joe's shoulders, an idea he uses to develop an argument that I will take up below. My point here is that Avildsen stresses an interclass coalition based on shared resentment. Thus, when William stumbles into the America Bar & Grill and mutters from his stupor that he has just killed a hippie, Joe Curran finds himself an unlikely ally, just as the construction workers found unlikely allies in the stockbrokers who joined with them when they attacked war protestors in May of 1970. The Hardhat Riot and Joe both offer illustrations of the realignment of blocs that Republicans hoped would result in their new majority. Avildsen employs interesting techniques to underscore both the external differences that separate Joe and William and their overlapping emotional states that enable them to forge, as Goodman describes it, "a curious but substantial relationship, a fraternity based on fear and frustration." Indeed, Avildsen's visual accentuation of the men's surface dissimilarities, which are rooted in class and the disparate working conditions of the different classes, emphasizes the movie's point that their shared fears and frustrations are culturally, rather than economically, based. In contrast to the wide-windowed, skyscraping, climate-controlled coziness of William's midtown office, the first shot of Joe's workplace centers on a time clock behind a cage. A drably- clad, big-bodied worker lumbers into the frame, and Avildsen cuts to a reverse shot of Joe's chagrined face, photographed tightly against the steel fencing, resignedly punching his timecard. His shirt, the fence, the wall, and the clock exude different shades of gray, and the overall composition of the scene effectively compares Joe's shift to a prison sentence. Inside the factory, Avildsen shoots Joe through the mechanized furnace he occupies. Wearing and sweating profusely, the contraption Joe wrestles combines elements of Chaplain's Modern Times and traditional conceptions of Hell. His is joyless, grueling work. To emphasize the heat, Avildsen cuts to a snowy sidewalk before panning up to a long-shot of Joe, lunch pail in hand, trudging home through the winter streets. Joe's position in the far corner of the frame, where he is dwarfed by his surroundings, convey his insignificance while the desolate, yawning distance between him and the camera indicates his sense of alienation. The country song on the soundtrack, "Hey, Joe," accentuates these feelings:

Hey, Joe Don't it make you want to go to war once more Hey, Joe Why the devil did we go to war before What the hell for?

We got to get this country off of welfare back our boys in Vietnam show this world we'll fight for freedom or doesn't anybody give a good goddamn?

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The lyrics articulate Joe's mixed feelings about his service during World War II. On the one hand, the drudgery of his work combine with his hatred of welfare and social change to conjure feelings that the whole endeavor was pointless. He works a job that he hates while others live off of the fruit of his labor. He feels as though this was not the way of life he fought to protect: "Why the devil did we go to war before/What the hell for?" On the other hand, war is looking like a viable alternative, not just in Vietnam, where it is necessary to show the world America's commitment to freedom, but here at home, too, against welfare recipients and war protestors: "Don't it make you want to go to war once more." The song serves as a foreshadowing of the final act of the film, when Joe goes over the edge into open and violent revolt against his hippie tormentors. At home, Joe fills the frame. His domination of the screen conveys that he rules the home front, as does the way in which Mary Lou waits on him. His sense of sovereignty quickly dissipates, though, when he finds out about the African American family moving into his neighborhood. News that his son, against his wishes, has bought a motorcycle and is out riding it follows, which sends Joe to his basement lair as his country lament picks up where it left off. Joe drinks and polishes his rifle while the soundtrack bemoans drug pushers dealing to kids, the necessity of having to work three nights of overtime a week, people demonstrating against his country, and those out for an easy buck. The reiterated sentiment of the chorus, "Don't it make you want to go to war once more," coming as it does as Joe cleans his rifle after failing to exert control over his neighborhood and family, sounds more ominous than it did when it played over images of a cold working man negotiating the icy New York sidewalks after a long, hot shift. Joe's violent fantasies comprise the basis of his admiration for William. After he sees the television news report and reads about the case in the Daily News, Joe figures out that William was serious when he said he had just killed a hippie (which, as the New York Times review points out, puts him way ahead of the police). The scene in which Joe contacts William and asks for a meeting plays interestingly because it indicates the complexity of their relationship. Joe calls William's office from work, and the way that he is wedged into the phone booth, and into the frame, perpetuates the idea that he is trapped at his job. However, Avildsen angles the camera upward, which signifies that Joe has the power in his dealing with William. By contrast, Avildsen shoots William at a downward angle to articulate that he, despite his cushy corner office and magnificent view, occupies the subordinate position in his dealings with the working-class Joe. Upon their first meeting, though, Joe eventually puts William at ease, but not before taking a few moments to enjoy having the upper hand over his upper-caste counterpart. William comes onto his turf, an Astoria bowling alley, where Joe ushers him into the back lounge and studies his face:

Joe: Hey, I know what you been thinking. [laughing] You been thinking I was going to put the old squeeze on you, didn't you? That's what you been thinking, right?

William: Yes, the thought had occurred to me.

Joe: Yeah, well, I could blackmail you. Hey, don't worry about it. I just wanted to shake your hand. I mean there I am, sitting in a bar, you know, drunk, shooting off. Just words. And you come in. And you did it! You did it! I just talk about it, but you did it!

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Joe is not interested in blackmail because he idolizes William, a man who has done something the audience has seen Joe talk about in a bar and fantasize about in his basement. Joe's enthusiasm for the deed starts to enable William to relax, and Joe's rationalization of the killing makes William open up about how he has been feeling about what he did:

Joe: Listen, nobody's going to blame you. A guy like that, your daughter. There's plenty of people, people with kids, you'd be a hero. The guy was selling dope, right? So now he can't make dope fiends out of anybody anymore, can he?

William: Yeah, that's right. God knows how many kids he hooked. Maybe [pause] maybe that's why I get this – I had it a couple of times lately – the feeling of pleasure? Satisfaction.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. Like in the war. You remember how you felt in the war sometimes after you killed a few of them? You feel bad, but you feel good at the same time?

William: Yes, well, something like that. Not exactly.

William's inability to articulate his feelings results from the fact that he murdered Frank only because he lost control of himself. His actions were not premeditated, and he is consequently still working through what happened. Joe, by contrast, has already thought extensively about the murders he will end up committing at the end of film, murders that William participates in only reluctantly. My point is that even though Avildsen stresses the interclass alliance the two men form, he specifically codes violence as a working class attribute; Joe personifies for William the unleashed rage that killed Frank, landed him in a working class bar, and set in motion this unlikely coalition. Put differently, William's rage and his capacity for violence, according to the logic of the movie, connects him with the lower orders of society, which is represented by Joe, who in turn keeps William in touch with that very part of himself. Joe and William quickly develop a symbiotic relationship. Long after he has verified that Joe has no interest in blackmail, William continues to fraternize with him. Joan does not grasp this aspect of her husband's bond with Joe, which is evidenced by this exchange they have after their awkward evening at the Currans':

William: You see, the crazy thing about Joe is that it's as if he shared in it. As if he killed that boy, too.

Joan: You have to keep on the good side of him. Isn't that what we were really doing there tonight?

William: Well, there's something else about Joe. Sometimes with him I almost feel as if what I did was a humanitarian act. I saved the world from another lousy junkie.

Joe lives vicariously through William and feels as though he contributed to the killing of a hippie, and he reciprocates by offering William rationalizations that permit him to think of his crime as an act of heroism. Nystrom points out that Joe performs another important function for William. Joe, he argues, inspires Bill to deride the emptiness of his profession and class status (26). After Joe

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likens William's murder of Frank to a war kill during their first evening together, he abruptly veers the conversation to a discussion of money. He volunteers that after union dues he makes four dollars an hour, one-hundred sixty dollars a week, and he jokes that his wages are not bad, "but you can't live on it." Joe asks William what he makes an hour, and William explains that he gets paid by the year. After some prodding, William states that he takes in sixty-thousand dollars annually, which impresses Joe as the kind of money that movie stars and union presidents make. After some bantering Joe grows somber and brings up the class gap between the two of them:

Joe: You know, guys like us, we don't often get a chance to talk to each other. Find it hard talking to me?

William: No.

Joe: Yes, you do. I'm just a working stiff, and you're way up there. Educated. Look, just talk to me the way you would somebody at the office, a friend, like that.

William: Joe, would you like to see where my kind of animal hangs out?

Joe: Sure.

William: Good. Now let's get the hell out of here.

Despite the fact that it comes after the rationalization of a murder, this exchange plays very engagingly, and the audience sees Joe at his most sympathetic, vulnerable, and human. William comes off well, too, and his intention for bringing Joe into his realm seems to be to show his improbable friend the reality underneath the luster of his world. William takes Joe to the place, described above, where the patrons look "like a bunch of fags." He follows up this observation by speculating that they must be smart, "They got to be smart, right?" William spots a coworker, Gil, from another department and, in a move designed to show Joe the dullness underneath the gleam, replies, "Joe, you want to see how smart they really are? Watch." He introduces Joe as the new executive vice president of Gil's department, adding, "I know he looks a little rough, but that's just part of his act." Gil instantly behaves obsequiously toward Joe, and when he leaves, Joe and William toast their prank. Nystrom observes that Joe's friendship provides William with "a working-class perspective from which to ventriloquize a sense of the apparent bankruptcy of his class's labor" (26), a critique that continues when they go outside into the cold New York night and get ready to part company. Avildsen presents a spectacular, rotating upward shot of several lit up buildings as William explains what really goes on in them:

William: Now, you see those buildings, Joe? Those beautiful monuments, concrete, glass. I work in one of them. And you know what they do in those buildings, Joe? They move paper. That's right. They pick it up in one place, and they move it to another place. They pass it all around their offices. And the more paper you move, the more important you are, the more they pay you. And if you want to really show how important you are, what you can get away with, you make little paper airplanes, and you sail them right up somebody else's ass.

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Joe: Do you ever get the feeling that everything you do, your whole life, is one big crock of shit?

William: Yeah.

As Nystrom notes, this is precisely what the counterculture was saying about William's work in particular and life in general, but the difference here is that "while Joe's friendship with Bill provides the occasion for Bill's critiques of professional labor, Bill is almost always the one who makes these critiques" (26). In other words, William is not put on the defensive with Joe as he is with the counterculture. Indeed, as their salary discussion shows, "Bill also can rely on Joe to respect and envy his material success," which stands in contrast to a counterculture that would inevitably hold in contempt his "materialistic pursuits and critique its role in perpetuating unjust social relations" (26). Joe, by contrast, is essentially conservative. He might prod William to admit that his life is a "crock of shit," but only after William has opened up about the pointlessness of his paper-pushing job. Joe openly admires William's salary, and he does not put forth a proletarian critique of capitalism that concludes with a call for the redistribution of wealth. As Nystrom puts it, "the precarious and perhaps even defenseless nature of class distinction is admitted, yet in such a way as to preserve one of the engines—material acquisitiveness—of this distinction" (27). Joe and William stand aligned against the countercultural New Left, whose goal was to throw a wrench into this engine. As Mellen puts it, Joe polarizes two groups, the proletariat and the counterculture, "whose individual disaffections, presented in other terms, might even merge" (26). Instead, conservative populist rhetoric fashioned by the conservative movement channeled working-class aesthetic disgusts, anxiety, and resentment into a stand against the very forces of change that could have been beneficial to them. As I have shown throughout this project, the postwar conservative movement has been fraught with an internal contradiction. The strategy to build a majority coalition was based on the possibility of an alliance between affluent economic conservatives and working-class social conservatives. It was, in short, a version of the plot of Joe. The Right courted these working- class social conservatives via populist appeals, which brought to the surface the inherent tension between the movement's quest for a new majority and its elite sensibilities. With his depiction of the painfully awkward evening that the Comptons spend at the Curran's house, Avildsen dramatizes the class-based conflict at the heart of modern conservatism. The director's vision of the social difficulty that results when the worlds of the country club and bowling league collide call to mind the images Andrew Hacker conjures, in his review of Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority, of Republican Party dinners being held in American Legion halls rather than Sheraton Inns, GOP burghers trading their martinis for beer, and takeout food replacing more refined fare (Please see Chapter One). Despite the obvious class gap, William and Joan seem game at the outset of the evening. Although dressed in a suit and tie, William wears a blue , which contrasts with what Joe has on, a white dress shirt open at the neck and a gray . The men's collar-swapping suggests that both couples are stepping outside of their respective comfort zones, a notion already conveyed from the Currans' end by Mary Lou's frantic pacing before the arrival of her guests. Upon her arrival, Joan does her best to make nice by plastering a perpetual smile on her face and lying (as she later reveals to her husband) to her hostess that her best friend in high school was called Mary Lou and she envied her for her name. She can barely hide her discomfort

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around Joe, however, at whom she steals stealthy glances filled with fascination and revulsion. Joe behaves in a boorishly hostile manner all evening. He may be sensing Joan's discomfort with him, or he may be embarrassed by Mary Lou's incessant chattering. Joan is baffled when Joe asks her whether she will have "a Bud or a 7 and 7," adding that they also have ginger ale, until William translates (and eliminates the choice of beer) by asking his wife, "Yes, how will you have your Seagram's 7 , dear? Ginger Ale or 7-Up?" William in effect explains that martinis and other such drinks will not be an option. With Joe mixing the highball and Mary Lou putting away their , William and Joan take in the Currans' living room with a mixture of wonder and mild horror. They exchange "let's just get through this" looks and William calls to Joe a perfunctory compliment about his house. After the Comptons' arrival, Joan compliments Mary Lou's curtains, and Mary Lou launches into a rambling story about buying the material to make them. Before the Comptons arrived, Mary Lou had been panicking that she and Joan would have nothing to talk about. Joe, implicitly arguing that gender trumps class, loudly reassured her that "You never had any trouble talkin' with the girls. Shuttin' you up was the problem." Then he added that women like to shop: "Look, you buy curtains, she buys curtains." In front of their company, Joe cuts off his wife's story with an authoritarian "That's enough," which stops Mary Lou in the middle of a sentence that she quietly finishes in meek humiliation. Joan is visibly embarrassed for Mary Lou and disgusted by Joe, who, oblivious to Joan's reaction, verbally nudges her, "She was wonderin' what you was going to talk about. I told her you was both women." Joan replies with an icily ironic, "That's right. We're all alike," a remark that removes what was left of the of politeness masking Joe's volatility. He glares at her and tersely asks, "What'd you mean by that?" Shaken, Joan is unable to formulate a response and is literally saved by the bell when the Chinese takeout arrives. By adding Joan into the mix, Avildsen emphasizes the extent to which William's rage and capacity for violence enable him to bond with a member of the lower order. Nystrom, in his analysis of the two men's first night on the town together, points out that "Joe's presence seems to engender an alimentary and a scatological rhetoric" (26). Indeed, the men ogle women and talk about the necessity of getting "a little on the side once in while," and in a restroom Compton makes a juvenile joke about the size of his genitals and ruminates on urination as "one of life's simple enjoyments." Thus Avildsen codes physicality in general, not just violence, as working class and masculine. Joan's refined presence alienates William from the masculine and physical aspect of himself; she keeps her husband among the higher order, hovering above the violent, sexual, and scatological, and he pointedly has difficulty connecting with Joe on the night that the couples get together. During dinner, Joan sneaks repulsed glimpses at Joe. Mary Lou expresses sorrow about the Williams' trouble with Melissa, to which Joe adds a grunting, "Kids." Mary Lou, who, in contrast to Joan, crudely eats with her fingers, attempts to initiate a discussion about how focused on the younger generation American society has become:

Mary Lou: Everything today's kids. They make you feel so old-fashioned, you know? We made our parents feel old-fashioned, but we didn't make 'em feel old-fashioned like the kids make us feel old-fashioned. Everything today's kids.

Joan: They are taking over the culture.

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Joe: [with baffled hostility] The what?

William: The culture: the movies, books, clothes, music.

Joe: [with rising anger] Yeah, yeah. They're all screwed up so they got control of the culture, right? They're all screwed up so they're screwing up the culture. Yeah, it ain't what the kids say, that we screwed them up. It's the other way around with all that culture crap. It's the kids who are screwin' us up. Am I right?

Joan: [nervously] Oh, yes. Of course.

Joe: Fucking-A.

Interestingly, when Joe first called William earlier in the film, there was a very large framed poster on his secretary's wall that read, in the part not obscured, "The Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs for the Cultural Showcase Festival." This, plus Joan's rejoinder to Mary Lou and William's explanation to Joe about the meaning of the word culture, indicates that the Comptons are active in the art world. As for the Currans, this exchange strongly suggests that they are not. Avildsen presents the Comptons as on a sojourn among the philistines, and further implies that without seething resentments toward other groups in society, the two families, and the economic strata they represent, have few interests in common and even less to discuss. Politically, the dinner party hints at the tenuousness of the alliance between the WASPs of the upper and the working class ethnics that Republican strategists such as Phillips and Rusher had in their sights. The evening as a whole dramatizes the tenuous foundation upon which the Republicans were hoping to build their new majority. After dinner Avildsen cuts to the basement where Joe and William discuss the source of their relationship, Frank's murder. Joe also shows William his submachine gun as the men stand with the HONOR AMERICA bumper sticker hovering between them in the low light. The most foreboding implications of the image come to fruition days later after William explains to Joe over the phone that Melissa found out about the killing and ran away from home. Joe volunteers to go into Greenwich Village to help William look for Melissa, and he reveals the true motives underneath his apparent act of altruism when they meet in a parking lot near the Bowery and William tells him that it could be a long night. "Ah, that's all right, that 's all right," Joe replies in an excited incantation, adding ominously, "I've been wantin' to see these animals where they live." As the word animal indicates, Joe is going hunting. Although William may not have the same violent intentions as Joe, they take in the aberrant environs of the Village with a shared sense of acrimonious scorn. Their common animosity enables them to recover from the awkwardness of the Currans' dinner party and reestablish their bond. Outside a clothing store window, they mock styles based on a Cowboy and Indian motif. William notes that the kids grew up on television, "Hopalong Cassidy at the age of three," which inspires Joe to scoff openly at the sincerity of the generation's beliefs, saying "Hopalong Cassidy. Real revolutionaries." Here Avildsen suggests that television is a major factor in the creation of the generation gap before moving on to suggest that food is, too. The searchers come across a restaurant that William recalls Melissa mentioning, The Cauldron, and they enter into an ambience of sitar music, removed , no alcohol, and macrobiotic food, which is, as the waiter explains, "food in accordance with the order of the 193

universe." This collection of signifiers points to the same countercultural embrace of Eastern mysticism that John Updike underscores about Jill in Rabbit Redux, and it creates mutual hostility between William and Joe on one side and the younger patrons on the other. When the hippie customers refer to William and Joe as "creeps" and make fun of Joe for looking "like a truck driver," Avildsen pointedly shows a source of Joe's resentment: long-haired, elitist students who openly mock the working class. This is the very class-based derision with which rhetoricians on the Right, from Nixon and Agnew to Rusher and Coyne, attempted to smear liberalism when they sought to conflate it with radicalism in the mind of the white working class. Nixon even makes a brief appearance, of sorts, in a trinket shop in the form of a poster that reads, "Would YOU buy a used car from this man?" The poster offends the patriotic Joe, who yells, "Look at that. The President of the United States. If you can't buy a used car from him, who could you buy a used car from?" Avildsen thus highlights that Joe, William, and Nixon are aligned in patriotic social conservatism against the elitist, countercultural youth. Another poster, this one of a young man and woman nude in a field, indicates the extent to which Joe and William's bond is based on a pursuit of physical release, a pursuit that Joe embodies for William. Looking at the photograph, Joe comments that "All I know is these fucking kids are getting more than we ever did." His interest in sex (and drugs) rises to the forefront in yet another restaurant, where a hippie girl flirts with him and he awkwardly flirts back. Her friends, hedonistic thieves Avildsen presents as the era's youth, note that "the truck driver digs you," and they decide "to put on" Joe and William. With the intention of selling them oregano, one of the guys from the table offers them marijuana, and William replies that they have all they need, which he does because he still has the stash that he took after he killed Frank. With William's drugs in mind, the hippie guy invites Joe and him to a party, and insinuates that they would get sex from the young women in their group. Joe, already excited about William's access to marijuana, fervently convinces him that they should go to the party to "infiltrate" the kids, adding as an afterthought, "you don't have to smoke the stuff." It does not take long before they do, though. Joe, obviously interested but reluctant, takes a hit from a hookah after getting called a chicken. He hands the pipe to William, prodding him to "get with the Pepsi generation," but only gets William to acquiesce by calling him a chicken, too, a sign that both men can be manipulated by impugning their manhood. As the older men giggle in a corner like kids, the hippies take off their clothes and begin to have group sex. Finally a part of what his introductory bar scene indicates he has been preoccupied with for some time, Joe mutters to William from a drug haze, "All my life, I ain't ever been to an orgy. This is an orgy, isn't it?" (He still uses a hard g to pronounce the word.) William assures him that what is going on around them does seem "to fit the definition." With Joe at the lead, the two men enter tentatively into the foray of free love. Sex turns to violence, especially for Joe, when they discover that the two hippie guys have made off with the sack of drugs and their wallets. Joe chokes his sexual partner until she gives up the location of her friends' commune in the country, and now that he knows the other place "these animals" live, he drives out to the country to hunt them. The massacre that results from Joe finding his wallet empty nearly ends when William, who had been standing frozen, comes to his senses and turns his rifle on Joe.

Joe: What are you gonna do? You gonna shoot me? Well, where's that gonna get you? You wanna shoot somebody, shoot them. Look, William. There's only one way out now: clean. That means everybody. At this point, it can get to be fun.

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William: No more.

Joe: I don't get you, William. You hate those kids. You hate the way those girls put you down. You hate the way those kids, those little shitheads, they made a shithead out of you. Guys like Frank—what Frank did to your daughter.

Joe shoots the kids in the corner.

William: No!

Joe: Look, William, you told me you got a kick out of killing Frank. These kids, they shit on you, they shit on your life, they shit on everything you believe in. They shit on everything! You hate 'em as much as I do.

When Joe goes to kill another one, he finds himself out of ammo and turns to his accomplice and tells him, "It's your ass now, Compton," which goads him into the spree that results in Melissa's death. Nystrom astutely connects Joe's incendiary and scatological incitement to violence to the scene where he asks Compton if he ever felt like his whole life was a "crock of shit" (26). As Nystrom points out, and as this scene clearly illustrates, William handles a drunken moment of clarity with a working-class man who shares his foundational values and harbors no desire to change the system significantly better than when the same basic criticism comes from smug youths who want to remake the world in their own image. Nystrom also notes that the rampage, as several popular critics (and, I would add, Klemesrud's profile of Boyle) point out, youths in theater audiences yelled variations of the phrases "We'll get you, Joe!" and "I'm going to shoot back, Joe" at the screen. They did not, however, yell "We'll get you, Bill," which he reads as a clear indication that the "violence is perceived to be entirely the responsibility of the working class man" (27). William, Nystrom argues, "is subsumed into Joe," an "erasure" that transforms a generational conflict between the "into a battle between students and workers—that is, the principally named combatants of the May 1970 Wall Street demonstrations" (27). This transfiguration of the conflict, and, more significantly, this erasure of the white power structure, is important because, to paraphrase Sally Robinson's analysis of Rabbit Redux, it indicates that class distinctions have blurred into a flexible idea of Middle America. This malleable notion of Middle America, I argue, is defined by resentments wrought by the social upheavals of the 1960s, which was the foundation upon which the conservative movement crafted their conservative populist message. This populist rhetoric simultaneously appealed to the white working class while shielding the white ruling class from their rightful blame for the very economic and social anguish that made these workers susceptible to conservative overtures in the first place. Joe thus stands as an important artifact of the late twentieth century American electoral realignment because it illustrates that strategists on the Right solved the challenge at the heart of the conservative movement, that is, the desire to win over the majority of voters without seriously modifying an economic system that perpetuates the wealth and privilege of the true elite, by forging coalitions built solely on fear, anger, and resentment. Joe, and the hardhat riot it mirrors, demonstrates that coalitions built upon simmering rage lead to acrimony and violence against diversionary targets such as African Americans, poor people on welfare, and war 195

protestors. With the latter in mind, Newsweek's coverage of the hardhat riot perfectly encapsulates the success of conservative movement. The article "The Hard Hats" opens with an image of battalions of police situated in the financial district "looking for all the world as if they were about to defend the palaces of capitalism and the Establishment from the ravages of some proletarian mob." But of course this anger was not directed at the district's financial institutions. As the article relates, the police were sent in to keep the proletariat from "smashing the heads" of war protesters "in a zealous, flag-waving display of their affection for capitalism, the Establishment, and President Nixon's Indochina policy." Rebellious energy now served to thwart and reverse social change, rather than advance it, as the white power structure used war protesters as a deflection and faded further from view. Conservatives, with Nixon at the fore, had invented and won over Middle America without threatening the reality of the American class system.

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