THE FEAR CAMPAIGN

THE presidential campaign of 1968 is dominated by a pervasive and obsessive issue. Its label is law and order.

Its symptoms are fear and frustration and anger.

Everyone is for law and order, or at least for his own version of it. Few Americans can define precisely what they mean by the term, but the belief that law and order is being destroyed represents a trauma unmatched in intensity since the alarums generated by Joe McCarthy in the Korean era. The issue has virtually anesthetized the controversy over Viet Nam. It has distorted debate over pressing urban problems. It has perverted the presidential election, the closest thing in this secular republic to a sacred collective act.

For millions of voters who are understandably and legitimately dismayed by random crime, burning ghettos, disrupted universities and violent demonstrations in downtown streets, law and order is a rallying cry that evokes quieter days. To some, it is also a shorthand message promising repression of the black community. To the Negro, already the most frequent victim of violence, it is a bleak warning that worse times may be coming.

The law-and-order issue has elevated George Wallace from a sectional maverick to a national force, making the two-party system seem suddenly vulnerable. It has lured Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew to the edge of demagogy, as they watch the national atmosphere darken and Wallace’s popularity grow. For reasons of his own, Hubert Humphrey has played less heavily on the fear of lawlessness, and he finds himself losing ground as a result.

The Mood of Crisis

So roiled is the country’s mood that Wallace describes his election as nec essary not merely to contain dissent and disturbance but also to protect dissenters and disturbers from repressions worse than any that he would impose on them. His implication is clear: only his victory can placate the New Right sufficiently to prevent vigilante action. This artful threat of ever more taut confrontation carries with it the prospect of still more violence, which in turn could lead to curtailment of traditional civil liberties. Some hard-core rebels of the farthest left would welcome exactly that. They reason that the resulting disorder could only weaken the system that they seek to overturn.

In this, they face the united opposition of the great mass between the extremes. Every citizen has a valid right to demand that his government provide security for his person and his property. This is perhaps the public’s first civil right. No responsible element quarrels with it. It is ironic that law and order, at best the glory of any society and at least an unobjectionable cliche, should have turned into a controversy. Partly it has happened because many vocal protesters put forth the old but troubling idea that, in certain circumstances, law and order must be defied for the sake of a higher justice.

Every pollster’s report, every sounding by reporters, attests to the momentum of the law-and-order issue. The surveys fuel the rhetoric from the right. Eighty-one percent of the public believe that law enforcement has broken down. Even more believe that a “strong” President can do something about it. By large margins, the public wants looters gunned down on the streets. By varying majorities, people blame Negroes, the Mafia, Communists, rebellious youth, the courts. Opinion Analyst Samuel Lubell travels the country and concludes: “To most voters, crime and lawlessness and the Negro are part of the same issue. The vehemence and profanity with which white voters voice their racial views have risen over the last two months.” A New York-based writer visits Baltimore and Washington, and finds that “crime—Negro crime—is almost the only topic of conversation.” The Aldine Printing Co. in Los Angeles, the world’s largest manufacturer of bumper stickers, reports that its bestseller is SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE, the old Birch slogan.

In communities that have experienced serious disorders and high crime incidence and where racial tension is a constant fact of life, there is a desperate urge to do something, almost anything. Firearms sales are at an alltime high. In Newark, a white organization, the North Ward Citizens Committee, has been openly arming for “self-defense.” Elsewhere, store owners are organizing self-protection groups. In Kansas City, 25 merchants in a racially mixed neighborhood are threatening to close their shops en masse.

“Block clubs” have been organized in some white areas adjoining Chicago’s South Side ghetto. Suspicious of interlopers, the clubs keep track of autos passing through the streets. They also follow up on arrests and prosecution of offenders. Joe Lenoci, 35, a factory production controller who heads one block club, says that he is not a racist or a fanatic. He just wants “the law changed so that police are not so handicapped.” Lenoci is uncertain what new powers he would give the police, and he cannot name the Supreme Court decisions he objects to.

Vicarious Troubles

There is hardly a single big city in which the individual feels completely safe on the streets at night. The fear of violence permeates the entire nation, wafted by television and newspaper headlines into areas that only vicariously experience serious trouble. In western Nevada, Ormsby County Sheriff Robert Humphrey warns: “What I’m afraid of is that the public will demand that we take too much authority. That is the real danger. But the alternative might be some kind of vigilantes.”

Utah is a peaceful state by any measure. Negroes make up three-fifths of 1% of Utah’s population. Yet a Bear Lake resort owner declares that “the politicians ought to move the Negroes back to the South, where they will be happy.” A Salt Lake City Mormon bishop says of youthful protesters: “They have been infected by drugs, and the drugs were supplied by Mexicans, Negroes or Chinese.”

State and local politics reflect the impact no less than national politics. New Hampshire is tranquil, but talk about law and order is rampant. Democratic Governor John King, now running for the Senate, discerns a fine grey line between treason and dissent: “We have reached the point where we had better draw that line and say, ‘You shall not pass.’ ” John Sears, Republican sheriff of Suffolk County (Boston) has been appointing Negro deputies, attempting to work with ghetto groups, and telling his men that they need not carry weapons at all times. His innovations have loosed a cascade of criticism from voters that, he admits, “will probably cost me the election.”

In Warren, Mich., a blue-collar town, Mayor Ted Bates has been pleading with his constituents to “unload your guns”—literally. Warren residents, predominantly of Eastern European and Italian descent, have been apprehensive ever since last year’s uprising in Detroit. Yet Warren has had a decreasing crime rate, and Bates observes: “We have no problems with hippies, yippies or zippies.” George Wallace draws strong support in Warren. Among Negroes in the surrounding area, the word is out that to get a flat tire or an empty fuel tank in Warren or neighboring Dearborn is to run a serious risk of physical assault. In upper-income Grosse Pointe, a matron laments about the Detroit area: “This place is becoming a jungle.” She is considering moving to California. In suburban Los Angeles, Morris Boswell, 52, a bulldozer operator, says that Wallace will be elected. Then, he says, “the punks, the queers, the demonstrators and the hippies—we’re going to put them on a barge and ship ’em off to China. Or better yet, sink it.”

In Winnetka, a prosperous suburb of Chicago, Mrs. John A. F. Wendt reads the Chicago Tribune, has a son working in Viet Nam for the State Department, and views the home front with horror: “This great country, with the great people who are in it, to have these things happen, you get the feeling it was all planned, all stirred up. I definitely think this Negro rioting is tied into this Communist thing.”

In cooler terms, Professor Philip Hauser of the University of Chicago analyzes what he calls the “social-morphological revolution,” the changing forms within society. Its four elements, according to Hauser: the population explosion, the population implosion that has made for densely populated central cities, the mixing of diverse population groups, and the accelerated tempo of technological and social change.

Few laymen can separate things so neatly in their own minds. The elements of turmoil blend into an ill-defined whole. But the three main tributaries that converge to make the law-and-order issue so powerful are: 1) the revolt of youth, whether against the war, the draft or the social system as a whole; 2) Negro militance and ghetto rioting; and 3) the individual’s intense personal fear of criminal attack.

The Young Radicals

The disorders of recent years have deeply offended the middle-class American’s traditional values. Mrs. Wendt speaks for many millions when she talks about “this great country.” For the majority, the U.S. has been and continues to be great in its bounty of personal freedom and material goods. And for the majority in recent years, there has been every reason to believe that good times were here to stay. Thus there is genuine outrage when protesters screaming “Liberty!” and “Justice!” defile an American flag that for most Americans has always symbolized liberty and justice. To most who have fought for that standard, the spectacle of youngsters waving Viet Cong flags comes as near-blasphemy.

Nor are the most visible young dissenters the recognizable types of 30 years ago—the trade unionists or the ideologues who peddled assorted versions of Marxism. They had specific programs and demands, many of which could be accommodated in relatively rational terms, and eventually were. With today’s breed of kid revolutionaries, who would close a campus for reasons incomprehensible to most older Americans, the authorities cannot even find a bargaining table, let alone a frame of reference in which to negotiate.

A working-class father who may have sacrificed for years in order to send his son to college cannot remotely comprehend why middle-class youths cry that “the system” is rotten. To him, they are all spoiled brats, profane, obnoxious, unwashed, promiscuous, to whom everything has been offered and from whom nothing has been demanded. To the more affluent, youthful rebellion represents a rejection of principles that have stood the test for generations. The fact that student discontent is an international phenomenon and has been more violent elsewhere—Ja pan, France and currently Mexico, for instance—is cold comfort.

The U.S. was born in revolution, but it was a revolution of Whigs against the Crown rather than one of Jacobins against the establishment. Tom Paine did not remain a national hero in the young Republic, and what is thought of as democracy today was some time in coming after independence. The radical has always offended most Americans, even if many of his ideas were eventually accepted.

The Black Militants

Disconcerting though the hippies and yippies may be, their contribution to the present malaise is minor compared with Negro militance and ghetto riots. From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, most Americans believed that justice was being done to the Negroes, that perhaps the American dilemma was soluble after all. Through presidential orders, civil rights acts and court decisions, the Negro was being propelled upward in legal status. Through generally rising prosperity and later the antipoverty program, the Negro appeared to be making economic progress as well. There were more black faces over white collars, more Negroes going to college, more owning their homes, more being admitted to clubs and fraternities and the ranks of government.

If to the blacks the more still seemed to be very few, it was reasonable to assume that evolution would take care of that. If the white man’s income was still rising faster than the black’s, Negroes were counseled to have patience. (In 1947, the gap between white and black median family income was $2,174; 19 years later, on the basis of constant dollars, the difference had grown to $3,036.) When brutal opposition to Negro progress persisted in the persons of the Bull Connors, and black children we’re dynamited to death in church, most Americans were shocked that such things could still happen. But they trusted Martin Luther King to keep his folks nonviolent. When blacks sang We Shall Overcome, the last word of the refrain was “someday.”

Yet, for all the symbols of progress, the economic and social pathology of urban ghettos worsened. “Someday” became “Freedom Now.” Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael decided that the Negro should no longer obey The Man’s timetable or believe in his good will. They echoed Isaiah: “What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?”

One by one, the ghettos exploded. These spasms of violence were accompanied by ever more urgent demands upon the white community from such moderate Negro leaders as King, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph, who needed concrete accomplishments with which to counter the militants. All at once, Northern liberals discovered that integration could mean demonstrations in front of their schools, protest marches on their main streets. All at once, Negroes were not just a faceless social cause, but a community of individuals, some of whom could be as intractable, nasty, destructive—and racist—as some whites had been all along. And through these discoveries ran the nagging realization that the more the Negroes got, the more they demanded. That this is a universal human trait was beside the point.

Violence, Rap Brown observed, “is as American as cherry pie.” History that most whites would rather forget supports him. Quite aside from the Ku Klux Klan’s brand of oppression in the South, Northern whites rampaged against Negroes in riots in New York City; Springfield, Ohio; Greensburg, Ind.; Springfield, Ill.; East St. Louis, Ill.; and Detroit long before Negro upheavals came into vogue. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission counted 2,595 lynchings of Negroes in Southern states between 1882 and 1959. Not one resulted in a white man’s conviction. Den nis Clark, writing in the Jesuit magazine America, makes the point that 100 years ago “the Irish were the riot makers of America par excellence.”

But violence in those days was absorbed in the onward rush of American life and the abiding faith in progress. Violence today is different, compressed in vast, complex, overcrowded cities; and blacks are not immigrants nor do they share the immigrants’ optimism. Actually there are signs at present that black riots are abating. Despite the chain reaction of violence in April, after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Justice Department counted 25 “serious to major” disturbances from June through August, compared with 46 during the same three-month period last year. The number of deaths went down from 87 to 19. The figures are hardly cause for rejoicing or complacency, but at least the trend is hopeful.

Still, TV has shown some of America’s greatest cities under siege. It has shown Negroes carrying out loot from burned-out stores, sometimes while policemen and troops looked the other way. This sight, perhaps more than any other, contributes to the belief that Negroes are basically indolent and immoral, that law enforcement in the U.S. has broken down, that the black man is getting preferential treatment. That conclusion is directly contrary to the hallowed Anglo-Saxon tradition of property rights. The fact that mass arrests are not always feasible in chaotic conditions is ignored. The fact that indiscriminate shooting in a few of the riots, particularly Newark and Detroit, killed innocent citizens is forgotten, and the fact that police gunfire can prolong and worsen the initial disturbance is often overlooked.

Personal Crime

What concerns most people even more directly than student rebels and black riots is the fear of crime against the individual, of “the prowlers and muggers and marauders,” in Nixon’s words. No one questions that crime is growing. The issue is just how much, and whether the election-year emphasis on it is exaggerated. The primary fever gauge is the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. The last full-year figures, for 1967, show an absolute 16.5% increase over the previous year in the offenses covered. The crime rate, taking increasing population into account, was up 15.3%. For murder, the increase has been 8.9%; for burglary, 14.6%. But one sympton of how haphazardly the U.S. has dealt with lawlessness is that, despite these seemingly precise figures, there is no certain knowledge of just how badly off the country is. Statistics have been kept only since 1930, and their basis—reports of known offenses submitted to the FBI by local authorities—is seriously flawed. In some categories, accurate comparisons between eras and areas are impossible because methods of collecting data have changed and local police departments vary in efficiency and candor.

There are other quirks as well. For decades, the FBI has used a $50 minimum in defining larcenies that make up an important part of its crime index. Obviously, the shrinking value of the dollar changes the meaning of those figures; partly as a result, larceny has been the fastest-growing category on the crime index recently. Another example: for as long as anyone has kept track, youths from the mid-teens to early 20s have committed the largest number of offenses in all categories. During the ’60s, the post-World War II baby crop came of criminal age. The fact that there are proportionately more Negroes than whites in the age group 15 to 24 explains at least in small part the higher arrest rate among Negroes.

Negroes do, in fact, account for more violent crimes in the cities than do whites; the poor usually do. Although Negroes make up 11% of the U.S. population, black arrests for murder last yea”r numbered 4,883, compared with 3,200 for whites. The overwhelming majority of victims of violent crime are set upon by members of their own race. That is why Negroes suffer far more from lawlessness of almost every sort than do whites. It explains why 2,000 residents of Watts recently petitioned their council representatives for better police protection. James Jones, Negro owner of a Washington steak house, is not alone in lamenting: “There are a lot of black fools in this world. If they are the chief violators of the law, then they are the ones who ought to be punished.”

The Negro’s exposure to black criminals makes him all the more indignant over the racial connotations of law-and-order rhetoric. William V. Patrick, head of New Detroit, a peace-keeping committee formed after the riot, protests: “It’s a horrible phrase, a euphemism for racial repression. First you had slavery. Then you had Jim Crow laws. Then it was called ‘separate but equal.’ Now it is called ‘law and order.’ ”

Even on the basis of the FBI figures, the notion that a virus of violence has suddenly infected a peaceful society is simply not true. During the 1950s, when reporting of offenses was less comprehensive than in the computerized ’60s, the FBI reported a 66% increase in crime, taking population growth into consideration. The comparable figure for the ’60s so far is 71%. While Nixon and Wallace charge that Supreme Court decisions bearing on eliciting confessions and the suspect’s right to counsel have hindered law enforcement, studies conducted by the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, the Yale Law Review and the Georgetown University Law Center show that this is not so.

What the Candidates Say

For the moment, much of the campaign talk is only adding to public confusion. Nixon reiterates that there can be no order without justice, that progress and peace go hand in hand. He goes on from there to attack the Democratic Administration for “grossly exaggerating” the relationship between poverty and crime. Nixon insists that doubling the conviction rate would accomplish more than quadrupling the antipoverty effort. Despite pressure from Republican liberals like Senator Edward Brooke, he is far less specific about social justice than he is about law and order.

Essentially, Nixon is trying to steer between the crass appeals to animosity of Wallace and the orthodox liberal approach of Humphrey. Eschewing concrete proposals, Wallace aims at his listeners’ gut feeling that crime must be quashed by any means available. Nixon attempts to sound both alarmed and controlled at the same time, but the element of alarm seems to be winning out. He cites the FBI figures without qualification: “If the present rate of new crime continues, the number of rapes and robberies and assaults and thefts in the U.S. today will double by the end of 1972.” He talks of the U.S. as the country with the “strongest tradition of law and order, now racked by uprecedented lawlessness.”

Nixon belabors the Supreme Court for “hamstringing the peace forces in our society and strengthening the criminal forces.” The court has borne the imprint of a Republican Chief Justice appointed by Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon has nonetheless succeeded in putting Humphrey on the defensive. Humphrey supports the Supreme Court. He lauds the Kerner commission report, which Nixon accuses of blaming everyone except the rioters and which Wallace terms “asinine and ludicrous.” To underscore the truism that neither party has a monopoly on crime, Humphrey points out that Wallace’s Alabama leads the nation in the number of murders, and that states with Republican Governors also have high crime rates (“if that means anything”). Humphrey likes to point out that he is running for President, not sheriff.

In the position papers issued so far, both Humphrey and Nixon propose large-scale federal assistance to local law-enforcement, judicial and correction agencies. Both emphasize the need for a major attack on organized crime and an enlarged role for the Justice Department. However, Humphrey’s proposals are considerably more detailed. He recommends, for instance, the establishment of “regional crime institutes” to do research and provide training and technical services for local law-enforcement agencies. And it is Humphrey who envisions the more prominent role for the Federal Government. To this, the Vice President adds strong and constant stress on the need for a wholehearted attack on the social and economic problems that he insists are at the root of lawlessness.

Humphrey is in trouble on the issue partly because his stand is not responsive to many whites’ fears of the Negro; but more importantly because even well-meaning whites have become deeply skeptical about the liberal proposition that social and economic improvements necessarily diminish crime.

What to Do

When Wallace says that force is the only way to ensure law and order he is far from alone. Last week the Dem ocratic National Committee received results of four regional polls on the issue, each asking whether respondents believed that the police should shoot to kill looters. The majorities answering yes ranged from 63% to 71%—and included many Negroes.

A legitimate concern for both white and black is the low estate of the na tion’s crime-fighting apparatus. Only 22.4% of all reported offenses even resulted in arrests last year, and that percentage is falling. The nation’s police are in dire need of all manner of help, and perhaps require a total redefinition of their role (see TIME ESSAY, p. 26). A study by the President’s crime commission last year included a unique survey of 10,000 families that indicated many serious crimes—in some categories as many as 50%—are never reported at all.

Law breakers who are caught get little benefit from the experience in terms of rehabilitation. Accurate figures do exist on recidivism, and they are appalling. Fully 60% of those arrested have at least one prior offense on their record. For those under 20, the figure is 70%. Generally speaking, the more serious the offense, the greater the chance that the accused is a repeater. It is no new theory that the entire criminal-law and corrections apparatus is in need of major overhaul. The same case was made more than 30 years ago by the Wickersham Commission, and has periodically been reconfirmed by other expert groups.

Of jails there are plenty, yet their major function is to provide custody and punishment, not rehabilitation. There are roughly 1.3 million people in jail or on probation or parole. There are only 25,000 social workers, teachers, psychiatrists and psychologists, parole and probation officers employed to attempt to salvage them. In one recent poll, the public indicated full awareness that the nation’s corrections system is a failure—and came out 2 to 1 against paying higher taxes to reform it.

Poverty’s precise role in the etiology of crime is not easily assessed. Dr. Leon Radzinowicz, a leading British criminologist, pointed out last week that England and Wales have had a constantly increasing crime rate for the past 25 years, despite historic social reforms and improved economic conditions. At the same time, it is an established fact that most criminals come from slums and have limited education, and that the incidence of crime in lowincome, congested areas and among broken families is severalfold that found elsewhere.

The Keener Recommendations

At the tactical level, the Kerner commission report recommended a number of obvious steps to curb riots, such as developing greater rapport between police and the ghettos, and avoiding overreaction to very minor incidents.

The main thrust of the Kerner re port, however, was aimed at basic causes and cures. Its central thesis was that the black’s adversity is attributable to white racism. That conception, while historically supportable, has only served to exacerbate the law and order fever. Nicholas Katzenbach, recalling his experience in the Justice Department, puts it this way: “In many places, we have had law and order without justice, operating extraconstitutionally. Often it is really nothing more than socially condoned violence.” It is doubtful that the majority of whites will agree with a point of view that amounts to Walt Kelly’s Pogoism: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Nor is it likely, given the nation’s mood, that the commission’s long-range proposals for social and economic programs at the federal level will soon be enacted on anything near the scale recommended. The report has provoked intense interest and prompted reforms in some areas; in many, it has been largely ignored. Mayor John Reading of Oakland, Calif., even accuses the Kerner commission of being partly responsible for the militants’ takeover of Oakland’s black leadership. “Permissiveness will do us in,” says Reading, “and the Kerner answer was permissiveness.” To this, New York Mayor John Lindsay, who was vice chairman of the Kerner commission, replies that if repression becomes society’s reaction to disorder, “we might then have to choose between the random terror of the criminal and the official terror of the state.

We might have to concede, openly and candidly, that The Great Experiment in self-government died, the victim of violence, before its 200th birthday.”

In the hope that the U.S. will hold a birthday party instead of a wake in the ’70s, the Kerner commission offers some cogent proposals. The nation’s welfare system must be reformed and upgraded to provide basic sustenance where needed and to discourage the breakup of families. The commission urges creation of 2,000,000 jobs within three years, with remedial training where necessary. That may be an impossible goal, but it would get at the largest single source of criminal raw material—the out-of-school, out-of-work kids. Prekindergarten, primary and secondary education in the slums is another vast target, but it is universally acknowledged that public education does not do much for ghetto children. One commission proposal that deserves serious consideration is a twelve-month school year for the culturally undernourished.

Challenge King George

It is largely true, as politicians never tire of remarking, that respect for law and authority—whether in the form of the cop or the university or the President—has diminished markedly in the last generation. However, a society that expects to keep challenge within reasonable bounds must retain a sense of perspective. Demands that the letter of every law be enforced to the full are risible. Myriad statutes range from Internal Revenue Service rulings to Coast Guard safety regulations for pleasure boats, and hundreds of such laws are widely flouted by the most respectable citizens. It is seldom that a responsible businessman engages in fraud or embezzlement, but when he does it is apparent to the poor that his transgression, however grandiose, rarely draws a penalty comparable in economic terms to that meted out to the petty thief. To which the responsible businessman is apt to reply that he spends a great deal of time and effort satisfying government laws and regulations, while the common criminal goes lightly punished —or so it sometimes seems to the embittered affluent citizen.

No one can argue that income tax evasion—or winking at gambling, prostitution or even pot—is comparable to major, violent crime. Yet such common transgressions symbolize an important fact: some laws are simply petty, unrealistic, unenforceable or unjust. The discrepancies affect the most trivial as well as the most important matters. If no one had had the courage to challenge state and local segregation ordinances in the South, would the cause of justice have been served? And what if no one had challenged King George’s laws and magistrates in the 1770s? When a society’s leadership lets too many oppressive or unworkable laws accumulate, or takes them too literally, it lessens genuine respect for laws that are just and necessary. But to break laws in order ultimately to change the Law is a near-desperate step permissible only when every possible hope of peaceful change has been exhausted; very few Americans would argue that, for all the country’s ills, that step is justified today.

In the end, the decisions in a democratic society must be made by the majority, and any violent challenge to its will must be dealt with firmly. The tyranny of a minority is far more obnoxious than the tyranny of a majority. And at present, the majority clearly feels that law and order must somehow be reasserted. But it would be tragic if in the process the nation were to allow its legitimate fears to be exploited, its understandable concern to be exaggerated. The balancing of law and order against freedom is at the very heart of civilization’s work. That work must be done by the leaders of the U.S. with a measure of magnanimity, a major effort at clarity—and a great deal of coolness. It will take an immense interlocking effort of more efficient and enlightened law enforcement, social reform and moral leadership. What is at stake is more than just the present election; it is, in many ways, the quality of American society for years to come.