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FREEDOMWAYS    SECOND QUARTER 1972

Republican and Southern conservative Democrats. In spite of their liberal pretensions, the Northern national leaders of the Democratic Party never purged its Southern conservative wing from the Party certainly, in part, because of the important committee chairmanships in both the Senate and the House which Southern Democrats have held consistently for several decades. This Southern Democrat-Northern Republican alliance has also been the chief vehicle through which the power of the Military Establishment has been escalated to its present level of disastrous proportions.

In the mid-1960's, the most reactionary features of U.S. foreign policy began to surface before the eyes of the American public. Under the Democratic Party President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the commitment of U.S. ground and combat troops to a racist and immoral war in Vietnam had the full support of the alliance referred to above in the Congress. In the Presidential elections the year before, sections of finance capital which had traditionally supported Republican Presidential nominees, now shifted, temporarily, to the Democratic Party in disagreement with the Goldwater faction's control of the Republican Party in that election. The black vote in the 1964 elections went solidly (94%) to the Democratic Party candidate, who incidentally had promised the nation that American troops would not get involved in Southeast Asia. By the time of 1968 elections, Lyndon Johnson had been forced into retirement and disgust with the var in Vietnam was so prevalent among the American people that the Republican Party was able to capitalize on this sentiment. The fascist-like conduct of the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, witnessed by millions of people on television, was of great political value to the Republican Party campaign despite the fact that the Nixon-Goldwater Republicans had been among the strongest supporters of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War policies. The Republicans, by promising nothing in the area of foreign policy and raising the "law and order" slogan and "crime in the street" issue regarding the domestic scene were able to make some headway in gaining support among the blue collar workers in the northern urban centers. These Italian, Polish and other white "ethnic group" working-class voters, concentrated largely in construction trades and defense industries, had once been party of the solid backing of the Democratic Party in the labor movement. The Republicans were aided in accomplishing this erosion of Democratic Party strength by George Wallace's American Independent Party whose votes came largely from a similar constituency of white working class voters in the South.

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THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM    O'DELL

The economic picture, which began to show serious signs of recession under the Nixon-Agnew Administration, probably was the chief reason the Republicans were not able to make gains they expected in the 1970 Congressional elections. These elections were something of a stalemate between the Republican and Democratic Parties with losses and gains on both sides.

The acute and chronic unemployment which is a feature of the present "recession," combined with the effect of the technological changes introduced in many heavy industries during the 1960's, has also resulted in the loss of trade union membership by the labor movement. UAW, Steel, Packing House and certain unions in the aero-space industry are among those which have suffered serious losses of membership. The net result is that labor's numerical strength, as a political component of the coalition in the Democratic Party, has been substantially weakened. Of course, many Black workers have dropped out of the labor movement under the impact of these conditions as well, but their political strength is retained as part of the voting power of the Black community. One of the casualties of the present recession, and a most serious one for the Black and other poor communities, is the Alliance for Labor Action which has dissolved. This was an AFL-CIO effort to organize the unorganized in the South. It has suffered the same fate as that of "Operation Dixie" more than 20 years ago.

the basic social class of our movement

Black labor has consistently pushed for the AFL-CIO labor hierarchy to get on with completing the business of organizing the unorganized. Indeed, part of the growing political impotence of organized labor is anchored in the fact that no serious attempt has been made to broaden its power base by adding to its numbers a substantial part of the millions of still-unorganized workers. As recently as the AFL-CIO Convention in Miami last winter (Nov. 1971) the Black delegates in attendance put forward this issue of organizing the unorganized, along with the weapon of the general strike to be used as an integral part of the struggle against Nixon's wage-freeze. Organized labor and the black community have been the chief pillars of the Democratic Party since President Roosevelt's New Deal. Nationally in the 1968 elections, black voters gave the Democratic Party's presidential candidate 20% of all the vote the Democratic Party received in that election. In some states like Louisiana, almost 70% of all the votes received by the Democratic Party in those elections came from the black voters. The

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