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FREEDOMWAYS    SECOND QUARTER 1972 

Democratic Party was the emergence of Governor George Wallace of Alabama as a major personality in the Presidential nomination contest. The Wallace forces have abandoned the third party route for the time being and have quite successfully entered the Democratic Party primaries which are selecting delegates to the Democratic national convention. Their strong showing in the Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan primaries suggests that this move back into the Democratic Party is a very significant one. It may well play a major part in deciding the fate of that party as a major political vehicle in the near future. Wallace will undoubtedly have upwards of 400 delegates committed on the first ballot which is a sizable bloc for bargaining especially for influencing planks in the national party platform.

While racism is unquestionably a major element in the voter appeal of the Wallace candidacy it would be a mistake to appraise this demonstrated voter support solely in terms of racism. The Wallace vote expresses the fact that millions of white Americans live dull, boring, monotonous lives, are burdened with taxes and bills, the latter acquired by living on the installment plan, and they are paying through the nose for the much advertised American standard of living. They hate their routine, monotonous jobs which provide them with no genuine satisfaction other than providing income which keeps them tied to the dream of one day being part of the "Affluent Society." They have some very real grievances, as do millions of non-whites, against the present socio-economic system which is rotten to the core.

Having had their perception of political reality blurred and distorted by the racism taught them through every institution in their daily lives, these white citizens are being stampeded into a right-wing conservative movement which will not solve a single problem they have. But it will take some time for them to recognize this, for immediately they seek emotional release from the pent-up frustrations they feel and the sense of insecurity arising from not understanding the changes going on around them in the world. And along comes George Wallace with country music, their own group of "heroes" called The Pontiac Nine who were arrested for blocking school buses in Michigan, and a slogan which exhorts the "little people" to vote for him as a way of "sending the message to Washington." George Wallace, the personality, is in the tradition of Southern demagogues from Tom Watson of Georgia, Ben Tillman of South Carolina who sabotaged the Populist movement of the 1870s and '80s, down to Huey 

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THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM   O'DELL

Long, Bilbo and Eastland in the present century. This year his candidacy has almost single-handedly made school busing an issue replacing "law and order" and "crime in the streets" which were the issues conservatives of both parties promoted in the '68 election. In 1968, Wallace ran for President on a ticket with General Curtis Le May which pledged to "bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age," a policy statement which Richard Nixon's Administration has embraced in practice.

Wallace's support among blue-collar white workers especially in the North is in great degree a by-product of the dead-endism of myopic political vision of the old-line bureaucrats who head the AFL-CIO. This labor hierarchy has remained hawkish on the Vietnam war, never did endorse the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963 and leaves it to students on the campuses to strike in protest against the United States military's barbarity in Southeast Asia. The fact that the labor movement has had no viable independent political thrust of its own in combating inflation and wage freezes and generally deteriorating conditions has helped create the climate for the Wallace "crusade." In many essentials, therefore, George Wallace is the alter ego of George Meany. The progressive rank-and-file movement that is growing within the labor movement around the issues of peace, full employment, an end to speed-up tax reform and other issues is the basic answer to the demagogy and illusions of the Wallace campaign. 

Wallace's ten million votes in the 1968 election and the apparent growth of this strength in '72 challenge our movement to increase the combined voting power of the Black and Spanish-speaking voters to at least a comparable figure during this crucial election year. In such a drive particular attention should be given to those large urban centers which will have mayoral elections next year (New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta and elsewhere). One of the most important results to be gained from this is the significant increase in the number of progressive elected officials on all levels of government.

The Democratic Party has, during the entire forty years since the New Deal, held within its framework political forces which were objectively contradictory and antagonistic to each other. It is inevitable that the Democratic Party cannot remain the party of consistent democracy and programs for the Black and Spanish-speaking communities, the youth, women, rural migrant workers, and the most progressive sections of the labor movement on the one hand, while serving at the same time as the party of the Southern Plantation Landlords,

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