Part 7 (1/2)
A neighborhood newspaper called it ”the blackest day in the history of the Southwest Community,” but also found the violence ”understandable.” The attackers, after all, had ”earned their way into the community by hard work and expect others to do the same.”
On Tuesday, Pat, Julie, and Tricia Nixon appeared in a photograph on the New York Times New York Times society page at the Paris unveiling of Pierre Cardin's fall line. A news brief noted RN's visit with the pope, part of every presidential aspirant's ethnic stations of the cross; his next stop was Tel Aviv, and he had already visited Ireland. Then he jetted off for Asia, where he'd earn notices such as these: ”Former Vice President Nixon met with President Mohammed Ayub Khan in Rawalpindi today. They are old friends. Field Marshal Ayub came to power in 1958 when Mr. Nixon was vice president. Mr. Nixon, on a world tour, will leave for Bangkok, Thailand, tomorrow.” While, back in Chicago, Mayor Daley met with Bungalow Belt civic leaders, who looked forward to solidarity from one of their own. society page at the Paris unveiling of Pierre Cardin's fall line. A news brief noted RN's visit with the pope, part of every presidential aspirant's ethnic stations of the cross; his next stop was Tel Aviv, and he had already visited Ireland. Then he jetted off for Asia, where he'd earn notices such as these: ”Former Vice President Nixon met with President Mohammed Ayub Khan in Rawalpindi today. They are old friends. Field Marshal Ayub came to power in 1958 when Mr. Nixon was vice president. Mr. Nixon, on a world tour, will leave for Bangkok, Thailand, tomorrow.” While, back in Chicago, Mayor Daley met with Bungalow Belt civic leaders, who looked forward to solidarity from one of their own.
But Daley was in a difficult spot. Arrest Martin Luther King, and Daley would become an international pariah. A committee of Chicago VIPs was shuttling back and forth from D.C. to lobby for the Democratic Party's 1968 convention. Hosting it was Mayor Daley's dream. Winning elections for the Democratic Party was the focus, the meaning, of Richard J. Daley's entire life. Here before him was the heart of his machine. Black Chicago had, meanwhile, given him 90 percent of their vote in 1963-and his margin of victory. This was perfect agony: his const.i.tuencies were at war with each other. And so he did something extraordinary: he lectured the stunned white ethnics. Told them them not to demonstrate. And ordered the police to offer King's marchers safe pa.s.sage. not to demonstrate. And ordered the police to offer King's marchers safe pa.s.sage.
August 5. Six hundred open-housing activists, ten thousand counterdemonstrators. Some wore n.a.z.i helmets. Others waved Confederate battle flags, carried George Wallace banners, swastika placards that helpfully explained THE SYMBOL OF WHITE POWER. THE SYMBOL OF WHITE POWER.
Martin Luther King, Mahalia Jackson by his side, led his legions forth: ”We are bound for the promised land!”
”Kill those n.i.g.g.e.rs!”
”We want Martin Luther c.o.o.n!”
Police trying to keep the two sides apart were screamed at: ”n.i.g.g.e.r-loving cops!” ”n.i.g.g.e.r-loving cops!” ”G.o.d, I hate n.i.g.g.e.rs and n.i.g.g.e.r-lovers,” a reporter overheard an old lady say. ”G.o.d, I hate n.i.g.g.e.rs and n.i.g.g.e.r-lovers,” a reporter overheard an old lady say.
Martin Luther King walked past.
”Kill him! Kill him!”
”Roses are red, violets are black, King would look good with a knife in his back.”
Instead he got a baseball-size rock above his ear. He slumped to the ground-the Gandhian moment of truth. ”I think everybody in that line wanted to kill everybody that was on the other side of the line,” a marcher later recalled. King got up and kept on marching. We shall overcome. We shall overcome.
On the approach to Halvorsen Realty, someone did did throw a knife at King's back. It caught some white kid in the neck instead. King had marched six weeks earlier through the Mississippi town where the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered. He had called it the most savage place he had ever seen. Now he revised his opinion: ”I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” throw a knife at King's back. It caught some white kid in the neck instead. King had marched six weeks earlier through the Mississippi town where the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered. He had called it the most savage place he had ever seen. Now he revised his opinion: ”I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
The march concluded, marchers dispersed. White neighborhood kids started battling police, clambering away with blood streaming down their cheeks, yelling what they heard the n.i.g.g.e.rs yell on the news: ”Police brutality!” A yellow convertible tried to run a policeman down. Two hundred teenagers set out to storm Mayor Daley's house. As police closed in, teenagers threw their incriminating a.r.s.enal of chains, cleavers, and clubs over the Thirty-fifth Street overpa.s.s of the Dan Ryan Expressway (an inattentive newspaper reader wrote to Senator Douglas and in the cognitive dissonance at the notion of lawless Caucasians called them ”a gang of Negroes”).
”There must be some way of resolving questions without marches,” Daley whined plaintively into the TV cameras, haunted now by the most frightening chant of all: ”Don't vote for Democrats! Don't vote for Democrats!”
Richard Nixon was in Saigon, denouncing Vietnam War critics at an airport press conference: they were ”prolonging the war, encouraging the enemy, and preventing the very negotiations the critics say they want.” He was simultaneously in U.S. News & World Report U.S. News & World Report with a guest editorial: ”If Mob Rule Takes Hold in U.S.-A Warning from Richard Nixon.” with a guest editorial: ”If Mob Rule Takes Hold in U.S.-A Warning from Richard Nixon.”
”Who is responsible for the breakdown of law and order in this country?” it asked. (The rhetorical question: a favorite Nixonian device. It made him look open-minded.) He framed the answer as a new version of his oldest political appeal. Blame the actual individuals who burned down buildings, certainly. But ”the more important collaborators and auxiliaries” were otherwise. ”It is my belief that the seeds of civil anarchy would never have taken root in this nation had they not been nurtured by scores of respected Americans: public officials, educators, clergymen, and civil rights leaders as well.” He named Hubert Humphrey, who'd declared he could ”lead a mighty good revolt”; the ”junior senator from New York,” who declared ”there is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law”; and generically, ”the professor” who, ”objecting to de facto segregation,” ends up turning youth into insurrectionists: to him ”it may be crystal clear where civil disobedience may begin and where it must end. But the boundaries have become fluid to his students.” Then, to prove ”the professor” had nothing on him, he quoted Chaucer: ”If gold rust, what shall iron do?” This was the argument he'd been making since Whittier: the Franklins were putting one over on the plain people.
Back in Was.h.i.+ngton, the long, hot summer played havoc with the Democratic coalition. Charlie ”Mac” Mathias, a liberal Republican congressman from Maryland, had spent the summer pus.h.i.+ng a compromise amendment to the civil rights bill exempting property covering four or fewer families-thus excluding the nation's suburbs and the bungalow belts. Enraged civil rights activists-at least the ones who weren't too militant to oppose legislative solutions at all-asked how something could be a const.i.tutional right, just not for the 62 percent of Americans thus excluded. The president came out against the compromise for that very reason. Dan Rostenkowski, one of the Bungalow Belt's congressmen, begged the White House to backtrack. His Bungalow Belt colleague Roman Pucinski told the press the president should order civil rights activists to shut down marches altogether. These were men, like most Northern Democrats, who answered to the label ”liberal”-Great Society men. The fight over the 1966 civil rights bill was calling all that into question. The Great Society was threatening their jobs.
Once it had been simple. Civil rights supporters knew who their enemies were: special interests such as the real estate a.s.sociations (who lobbied against the Mathias compromise for making something evil ”palatable to the American people”). The lunatic far right (the executive director of the Liberty Lobby testified that King's movement employed ”ma.s.s brainwas.h.i.+ng” just like ”in n.a.z.i Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, and Communist China”). The old-line racist Dixie gargoyles (they kept on rehearsing for a revival of Birth of a Nation Birth of a Nation: Senator George Smathers wondering why ”when a colored boy rapes a white girl, he gets off easier”; Representative William C. Cramer raising the specter of the ”Social Security widow in my district” forced to rent to a black man-and you could almost picture the l.u.s.ty young buck he had in mind). This This opposition was predictable. The curveball was the opposition was predictable. The curveball was the new new opposition: the Pucinskis and the Rostenkowskis; the Jerry Fords, moderate Republicans who used to be the backbone of every civil rights vote. Now, the Dixie gargoyles were gloating, an ancient piece of Southern political folk wisdom was receiving its vindication: that once civil rights bills started affecting North as much as South, it wouldn't just be Southerners filibustering civil rights bills. opposition: the Pucinskis and the Rostenkowskis; the Jerry Fords, moderate Republicans who used to be the backbone of every civil rights vote. Now, the Dixie gargoyles were gloating, an ancient piece of Southern political folk wisdom was receiving its vindication: that once civil rights bills started affecting North as much as South, it wouldn't just be Southerners filibustering civil rights bills.
The Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal articulated an argument echoing through Congress: ”It is strange, although to an extent understandable, that the more civil rights legislation is piled onto the statute books, the more Federal money poured into attempts at Negro betterment, the more help freely proferred by businesses and individuals-the more the anger rises.... Every legislative enactment seemed to incite more mob activity, more riots, demonstrations, and bloodshed.” Sam Ervin reported that the Senate Judiciary Committee had received over 8,000 letters on t.i.tle IV. Only 125 favored enactment. articulated an argument echoing through Congress: ”It is strange, although to an extent understandable, that the more civil rights legislation is piled onto the statute books, the more Federal money poured into attempts at Negro betterment, the more help freely proferred by businesses and individuals-the more the anger rises.... Every legislative enactment seemed to incite more mob activity, more riots, demonstrations, and bloodshed.” Sam Ervin reported that the Senate Judiciary Committee had received over 8,000 letters on t.i.tle IV. Only 125 favored enactment.
On July 25, when the bill was called up for ten hours of debate, the House floor had become a raging cauldron of incommensurate arguments over whether civil rights bills prevented riots or caused them. A conservative from Mississippi entered every news item about violent crime from that day's Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post into the into the Congressional Record. Congressional Record. A liberal from California pleaded that the ”thousands of young Negroes who are militant and on the march” that Congress should be listening to were the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines fighting in Vietnam, who needed open housing to enjoy the fruits of the American dream upon their return. Republican Jim Martin of Alabama-running against Lurleen Wallace for governor-said, ”The FBI has positive evidence that professional Communist agitators have helped to stir up recent Negro riots” via ”secret messages by code transmitted from radio stations.” Cleveland Democrat Wayne Hays blamed civil rights marchers: ”Are they Americans? Are they traitors? What kind of people are they?” Six of the freshman Democrats who'd replaced Republicans on Lyndon Johnson's coattails voted to strike the open-housing section altogether. A liberal from California pleaded that the ”thousands of young Negroes who are militant and on the march” that Congress should be listening to were the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines fighting in Vietnam, who needed open housing to enjoy the fruits of the American dream upon their return. Republican Jim Martin of Alabama-running against Lurleen Wallace for governor-said, ”The FBI has positive evidence that professional Communist agitators have helped to stir up recent Negro riots” via ”secret messages by code transmitted from radio stations.” Cleveland Democrat Wayne Hays blamed civil rights marchers: ”Are they Americans? Are they traitors? What kind of people are they?” Six of the freshman Democrats who'd replaced Republicans on Lyndon Johnson's coattails voted to strike the open-housing section altogether.
When the Mathias Amendment was put to a full House vote, an oddball coalition saw to its pa.s.sage by one vote: liberals trying to save a half-loaf version of open housing so that the final bill might pa.s.s; conservatives trying to save a half-loaf version of open housing so the final bill might fail. fail. Some congressmen were just confused about what they were voting on at all. The bill was sent to the Senate by a vote of 259157 on August 9. That same day in Lansing, Michigan, five cops were injured by firebombs and rocks; in Detroit, whites started stoning cars filled with blacks; in Milwaukee, a bomb tore open the office of the NAACP. In Cleveland the grand jury turned in its verdict that the riots were the responsibility of Communists. In Brooklyn two white men were shot after a brawl over racial slurs; in Grenada, Mississippi, ”while,” the Some congressmen were just confused about what they were voting on at all. The bill was sent to the Senate by a vote of 259157 on August 9. That same day in Lansing, Michigan, five cops were injured by firebombs and rocks; in Detroit, whites started stoning cars filled with blacks; in Milwaukee, a bomb tore open the office of the NAACP. In Cleveland the grand jury turned in its verdict that the riots were the responsibility of Communists. In Brooklyn two white men were shot after a brawl over racial slurs; in Grenada, Mississippi, ”while,” the New York Times New York Times reported, ”state and local law-enforcement officials stood by, laughing and chuckling,” a white mob ran off six hundred desegregation marchers. (”You're going to see a show tonight,” the sheriff had promised newsmen.) In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that week, Secretary of State Dean Rusk's twenty-five-year-old son, a leader of the National Urban League's militant faction, stepped up to the podium at the group's convention and said the civil rights movement suffered, if anything, from ”too much reasonableness.” He finished, to a standing ovation, ”Watts came at noon. What will be our midnight?” reported, ”state and local law-enforcement officials stood by, laughing and chuckling,” a white mob ran off six hundred desegregation marchers. (”You're going to see a show tonight,” the sheriff had promised newsmen.) In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that week, Secretary of State Dean Rusk's twenty-five-year-old son, a leader of the National Urban League's militant faction, stepped up to the podium at the group's convention and said the civil rights movement suffered, if anything, from ”too much reasonableness.” He finished, to a standing ovation, ”Watts came at noon. What will be our midnight?”
And in the Senate, Everett Dirksen, Paul Douglas's conservative Republican senior colleague, whose acquiescence had been instrumental to the pa.s.sage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act (”Stronger than all armies is an idea whose time has come,” he had said then), now made the same argument Goldwater had made in 1964: ”I have no doubts whatsoever as to its unconst.i.tutionality.”
Even Paul Douglas started to waver. He claimed residential segregation was merely the result of a benign ”consciousness of kind,” birds of a feather flocking together. The former social scientist was willfully ignoring, for instance, his own city's Dan Ryan Expressway, fourteen impregnable lanes built to separate Mayor Daley's neighborhood of Bridgeport and the black West Side. The previous year, Martin Luther King had called Douglas ”the greatest of all senators.” Now he was aping Daley. Without Daley's support, after all, he might just lose his job, now that he was getting letters like these: ”It is my firm belief, and of all my neighbors, that King should be taken into custody.... Today, the insufferable arrogance of this character places him on a pedestal as a dark-skinned Hitler.”
”Is the ultimate aim the same as the Soviet Union when all property was collectivized?”
”We are writing you and requesting legislation for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
”If our present leaders are confused, perhaps a completely new group would be able to handle the situation better.”
”IT IS TIME TO CHANGE THE LAW TO PROTECT ALL THE PEOPLE.”
In Chicago, movement Turks like Jesse Jackson were insisting it was time to move on Cicero-the nation's largest munic.i.p.ality without a single black resident. The last time a black man tried to live there, in 1951, the ensuing white riot was so big it made news around the world. This very summer a teenager who crossed over the border looking for work was beaten to death. ”We expect violence,” Jackson said, ”but it wouldn't be any more violent than the demonstrations last week.” Another King deputy, James Bevel, said, ”We will demonstrate in the communities until every white person out there joins the Republican Party.”
At that, Daley gave in: he would negotiate with King.
An August 17 meeting with Daley and civic leaders ended with a pledge to hash things out in an all-day ”summit” at the Palmer House Hotel. The next day, Daley played an ace stored up his sleeve. A machine judge issued a clearly illegal injunction against future marches. Daley presented his doughy mug on all three TV networks and offered a brilliant rationale: he claimed a 25 percent increase in crime in August so far, especially ”those areas where there are the most families,” because so many police were being diverted to protect marchers. (A letter to Senator Douglas the next day: ”We believe sir, that unless you take action, blood will be shed on every street corner of our great city.”) King played an ace of his own: if the Palmer House meeting didn't yield a satisfactory agreement, they would march on Cicero. The Cook County sheriff called that ”awfully close to a suicidal act” and readied the governor to call the National Guard.
The Klan received a permit to rally in Marquette Park. The mayor was asked if that meant they were welcome in Chicago. No more or less, he said, than Martin Luther King. He went to the Palmer House meeting, advised by his City Council speaker, Tom Keane, to ”f.u.c.k 'em,” and negotiated an agreement Mike Royko called ”an impressive doc.u.ment, chock full of n.o.ble vows and promises” that ”wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.” King's organizers signed off on it and left Chicago, not a single bungalow-block breached. f.u.c.k 'em Daley had. He just did it in slow motion.
His white const.i.tuency was not sated. Their mayor had negotiated with a terrorist. ”When greedy Mr. Hitler started taking over other countries, people at first thought 'give him a little more, then he will be satisfied,'” one wrote Senator Douglas. ”Give greedy Mr. King a little more freedom then he will stop. Isn't that what we are being told today?”
Stokely Carmichael's barnstorming lectures made all the papers: ”When you talk of Black Power, you talk of bringing this country to its knees...you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created”; ”In Cleveland, they're building stores with no windows. I don't know what they think they'll accomplish. It just means we have to move from Molotov c.o.c.ktails to dynamite.” Senator Abraham Ribicoff opened hearings to ”undertake a detailed, full, and in-depth appraisal of the crisis in America's cities and the role of the Federal Government in meeting it.” The proceedings trailed fumes of apocalypse. The attorney general said, ”There are thirty or forty cities with the same problems” as Chicago. (The New York Times New York Times reported that under the headline ”Katzenbach Warns Senate 30 or 40 Cities Face Riots.”) The reported that under the headline ”Katzenbach Warns Senate 30 or 40 Cities Face Riots.”) The U.S. News U.S. News roundup ran under the headline ”A Trillion Dollars to Save the Cities?” The liberal roundup ran under the headline ”A Trillion Dollars to Save the Cities?” The liberal Sacramento Bee Sacramento Bee editorialized that if such sums were not spent, the ”explosive ghettoes...are in danger of becoming the cities themselves.” Joseph Alsop, perhaps the most influential columnist in the United States, wrote a series of columns making the same argument demographically: in 1961, twenty-six thousand white children attended Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., elementary schools. Now so many whites had fled to the suburbs that the number was thirteen thousand. He predicted there would be, ”one day, a President Verwoerd in the White House.” editorialized that if such sums were not spent, the ”explosive ghettoes...are in danger of becoming the cities themselves.” Joseph Alsop, perhaps the most influential columnist in the United States, wrote a series of columns making the same argument demographically: in 1961, twenty-six thousand white children attended Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., elementary schools. Now so many whites had fled to the suburbs that the number was thirteen thousand. He predicted there would be, ”one day, a President Verwoerd in the White House.”
Hendrik Verwoerd was the prime minister of South Africa, the architect of apartheid. A few days later, that particular premonition of apocalypse was capped off when Verwoerd was a.s.sa.s.sinated on the floor of parliament.
Perhaps our Verwoerd would be Wallace. He gave a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police explaining what the Johnson administration knew full well but would not admit: that the summer's riots had been planned at ”a conference of world guerrilla warfare chieftains in Havana, Cuba,” that ”bearded beatnik bureaucrats” were ”contributing leaders.h.i.+p, and in some instances, public funds to help finance the discord,” and that if the ”police of this country could run it for about two years-then it would be safe to walk in the parks!” The men in blue gave him more than a standing ovation. They stood on their chairs. it would be safe to walk in the parks!” The men in blue gave him more than a standing ovation. They stood on their chairs.
A third wave of disturbances broke out in late August: Milwaukee; Brooklyn; Benton Harbor, Michigan; Dayton, Ohio (the National Guard stayed in town to make sure things were safe enough for the president to make a scheduled Labor Day speech). After one broke out in Waukegan, Illinois, a Republican official b.u.t.tonholed Charles Percy: ”Chuck, do you have have to talk so much about open housing?” Though the remarkable fact now was that it didn't matter if he talked about it or not. He was beginning to benefit from the issue by the simple fact of being a Republican. The old calculus of what kind of voters were bedrock Democrats and which were susceptible to Republican appeals was slipping away week by week. to talk so much about open housing?” Though the remarkable fact now was that it didn't matter if he talked about it or not. He was beginning to benefit from the issue by the simple fact of being a Republican. The old calculus of what kind of voters were bedrock Democrats and which were susceptible to Republican appeals was slipping away week by week.
That August was a watershed in American history. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the ”party of Lincoln” was identified by the public as the party more favorable to the aspirations of Negroes. The Democrats' situation was complicated: they simultaneously began winning the allegiance of black voters by dint of the New Deal and relied on Southern segregationists for their majorities. But by the early 1960s, with Goldwater conservatives in the ascendancy among Republicans, and Northern liberals in the ascendancy within the Democratic coalition, a crossover point had been pa.s.sed. Decades later, two political scientists crunched the opinion poll numbers and identified 1958 as the key date at which both parties were judged equally Negro-friendly. After that, the two parties diverged. The trend had been plotted through contingent accidents of history: John F. Kennedy's decision to phone Coretta Scott King with words of support as her husband sat in jail in Atlanta on the eve of the 1960 election, sending troops to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962, introducing a sweeping civil rights bill in response to the violence in Birmingham in 1963; and Nixon sending Barry Goldwater to campaign for him in the South in 1960, then the selection of Barry Goldwater as the next Republican nominee. The evolution was uneven: plenty of Southern Democrats were still segregationists, plenty of Republicans championed civil rights-such as John Lindsay, who as a congressman pushed for a civil rights law to the left of JFK's, then was hailed as the savior of the post-Goldwater GOP when he won New York's mayoralty in 1965. The first black since Reconstruction likely to be senator, Attorney General Ed Brooke of Ma.s.sachusetts, was a Republican. George Romney won and rewon the governors.h.i.+p of Michigan by championing civil rights. One official party brochure pointed in 1965 to LBJ's ”failure to enforce civil rights legislation” as a reason to vote Republican.
The long, hot summer of 1966 was when the national Republican Party changed its mind.
Manny Celler had been shocked by the vituperative response of Minority Leader Ford at his July motion to rush the civil rights bill to the floor. Evans and Novak reported that Ford had been coming ”under heavy, concealed pressure from liberals and moderates...not to put the Party's stamp on an amendment to strip the housing section from the administration's civil rights bill.” But in a statement on August 2, that was exactly what Ford's House Republican Policy Committee did. Ford began the press conference with a flourish toward the GOP's historical leaders.h.i.+p in ”the fight for justice and progress and human rights.” He then declared, however, ”Respect for law and order is basic to the achievement of common goals within our nation,” and blamed the open-housing struggle for law and order's decline. ”Since its inception, it has created confusion and bitterness. It has divided the country and fostered discord and animosity when calmness and a unified approach to civil rights problems are desperately needed.”
And so on the first anniversary of the riots in Watts, twenty-one months after the 1964 Johnson landslide, Goldwaterism became official House Republican policy on civil rights.
The Republicans were only following the lead of the public. Millions of voters were newly equating Republicanism with preserving their homes, and voting Democratic with surrendering them. In California, people who'd voted Democrat their entire adult lives were pledging fealty to Ronald Reagan. In Chicago, John Hoellen, a George Wallacestyle backlasher and one of the city's few Republican aldermen, was mounting a surprisingly strong challenge against Roman Pucinski-an unheard-of threat to the invincible Daley machine. Pucinski plunged forth to save himself by urging court-ordered restraints on civil rights marches. Hoellen did him one better by proposing that Martin Luther King be taken into immediate custody. In the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Stewart Alsop recorded his pleasure that two ”men of genuine ability” were contending for Illinois's Senate seat, and that both ”courageously maintained stands for open housing”-but had to admit that ”Percy benefits from the backlash nearly as much as the backlasher Hoellen.... In a system accustomed to straight-ticket voting, many an angry white voter will simply pull the Republican lever.” Stewart Alsop recorded his pleasure that two ”men of genuine ability” were contending for Illinois's Senate seat, and that both ”courageously maintained stands for open housing”-but had to admit that ”Percy benefits from the backlash nearly as much as the backlasher Hoellen.... In a system accustomed to straight-ticket voting, many an angry white voter will simply pull the Republican lever.”
As for Senator Douglas, he got more and more letters like this: ”While you sit on your b.u.t.t in Was.h.i.+ngton Martin Luther King is violating everything I bought and paid for. That jacka.s.s Percy is beginning to look good to me.”
And at that jacka.s.s Percy's headquarters, certain ideological adjustments were being considered.