TIME TO REMEMBER "FORGOTTEN AMERICA'

THEY are the descendants of Jacksonian America. Once they were the heroes of the American democratic my thology. Walt Whitman catalogued them. Carl Sandburg cel ebrated them. "The people will live on," he wrote -- mean ing the workers, the "common man" in a slightly nostalgic sense, the people nowadays referred to as the lower middle class. The traditional American values and ambitions sus tained them. Today, those virtues seem to many to be mocked and perverted. The white lower middle class feels dan gerously ignored, as outdated as Norman Rockwell's folksy icons. With justice, Richard Nixon calls them "forgotten Americans."

They live in overmortgaged, underserviced blue-collar ghet tos where they pay a stiffer price -- in poor schools, en croaching throughways and war casualties -- than do affluent whites across the city lines. 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 day of diz zying moral change, they see themselves as the last defenders of moral authority. That is why they still admire the military and regard the police as heroes. The New York Times's Tom Wicker had a revelation at the Chicago convention: "These were our children in the streets and the Chi cago police beat them up." The Gallup poll recorded that 56% of the people interviewed approved of the Chicago cops. What those people meant was: "Those were our chil dren who were doing the beating." They also meant that their view of themselves as a last moral bastion has become ever more frustrating. Lower-middle-class Americans read of millionaires who pay no taxes. The clergymen whom they value lead open-housing demonstrations. They dream of sending their children to college, but the universities have become battlegrounds for black militants and white rad icals. Their bumper stickers suggest an apprehensive kind of jingoism (REMEMBER THE PUEBLO), and the decal Amer ican flags on their car windows bespeak a defensive patri otism (THESE COLORS DO NOT RUN). Patriotism as they see it is assaulted everywhere. "You're trying to teach your chil dren one set of values and every element of life around them shows you up as a square," laments Elaine Whitehead, a telegrapher in Bellingham, Wash. "Sometimes I feel like grabbing a burro and gold pan, packing up my family and heading for the hills."

Call It Hate Economically, they are the "marginal" whites who earn be tween $5,000 and $10,000 a year and represent 40% of American families. They are factory workers, storekeepers, small farmers, cab drivers, policemen, firemen, longshoremen, post al clerks, many public school teachers -- and a number of the elderly. In theory, they have never been so prosperous.

Yet the median U.S. family income is still only $7,974 a year. According to the Labor Department, an urban family maintains a "poor" standard of living at $5,915 a year, while a "moderate" standard of living requires $9,076.

Thus the working-class or lower-middle-class American hangs in anxious suspension above poverty and well below af fluence. Meantime, his wage gains are being eroded by in flation, rising taxes and the lure of easy credit for new cars and other luxuries. "This man feels himself more alone than any other member of society," says Saul Alinsky, a life long organizer of working-class movements. "He is almost out of his mind with frustration -- call it hate. He sees his Government, with programs for blacks and for the indigent and programs for everyone except him, and he figures, 'God dammit, I'm paying for this out of my pocket.' He's got some bungalow in a development and a whole bookful of in stallment payments and he is mad as hell."

Trapped in a racial buffer zone between the black ghetto and white suburb, the white lower middle class is hit hard for revenue to finance welfare and all the other rising costs of big-city government. The middle class has the heaviest tax burden, but almost everywhere lower-middle-class whites feel that they are being forced to pay the real price of in tegration while assorted social planners and liberal moralists retreat at night to their suburban fastnesses. Such whites view bussing, for example, as a scheme to move their chil dren to worse public schools while rich children escape to pri vate schools. In typical response, a West Coast carpenter moonlights without reporting his side income. "Screw the Government," he says. "They just give it to some black bas tard anyway for doing nothing."

Legitimate Fears The overriding social task for the U.S. is to achieve ra cial justice and heal the most serious breach in American so ciety since the Civil War. The hard fact is that this will demand sacrifices by all white Americans, including the lower middle class. But no permanent domestic accord can be reached if the white lower middle class remains per suaded that it is being called upon for more than its fair share of those sacrifices. The Kerner commission cited "white racism" as the principal cause of racial violence. Up to a point, the charge is just, and the white lower middle class carries its share of bigotry -- a moral sin against blacks that will have to be paid for sooner or later as surely as the economic and social sins. But as the nation recognizes the le gitimate demands of the black revolution, it must also acknowledge the legitimate fears of the white reaction. Otherwise, feeling threatened, the marginal whites themselves may threaten a society that they feel has betrayed them. It does little good to condemn -- and further alienate -- pre cisely those working-class whites whose good will and co operation are vital to achieving racial peace and urban progress.

What can be done for white lower-middle-class Americans? To some extent, many seem reassured by the mere fact that the Nixon Administration is in power. Nixon is their man in style, tone and convictions. Psychologically, at least, he has made some gestures in their direction. He has said and done less than his predecessor about helping blacks -- which from the national viewpoint will probably prove to be a dangerous tactic in the long run. He has taken tough positions on law enforcement and student unrest -- without, how ever, going as far as the forgotten American wants. Nixon is trying to end the Vietnamese war -- an effort welcome to al most all Americans but one that has certain connotations of defeat and betrayal to the white lower middle class. One of the most urgent practical measures for this group is tax re lief. Saul Alinsky is now training organizers to mobilize the middle class. Among other things, Alinsky suggests that the Internal Revenue Service should issue cards to people with family incomes of less than $12,000 a year; holders of such cards would be exempted from paying sales taxes. Beyond that fetching if improbable idea, serious reform might include a doubling of the federal income tax's $600 ex emption per dependent. The states could help lower-income communities by easing the ruinous burden of local school taxes, replacing them with a graduated statewide tax that might equalize city and suburban allocations for schools and benefit both blacks and whites.

Almost everyone now agrees that the welfare system is a mess, though few agree on what should be done. The Ad ministration is now preparing reforms of the welfare sys tem, and may eventually work toward abolishing it -- re placing it with an evenhanded guaranteed annual wage or family allowance that would clearly help the lower middle class as well as the poor. White workers, however, would have to be persuaded that such an allowance did not represent simply another something-for-nothing scheme.

Even the most recalcitrant whites are likely to accept social integration at a faster rate if they gain far more than they lose in the process. One idea should certainly be tried out in the hundreds of lower-middle-class schools that are now in many ways just as inferior as those in black ghettos; these schools should be upgraded while being integrated. Instead of punishing communities that fail to integrate, for example, the Federal Government might well reward those that do so by increasing their subsidies. Equally important, the cities must soon combine help for black ghettos with more aid for blue-collar neighborhoods--better garbage collections, recreational facilities and police protection.

Although organized labor was once the champion of social change, many unions have a shabby record of racial obstructionism. The labor involvement in minority causes now seems a bit more promising--at least at the national level, if not among locals and individuals. The new Alliance of Labor for Action, formed by the U.A.W. and the Teamsters, suggests that some unions may become belatedly re-engaged in social progress. Still, white union members are not likely to open their ranks to Negroes until some of their own basic fears are calmed. One major anxiety is that automation will replace workers. Another is the boredom that afflicts many assembly-line workers at age 30 or 35. Unions, corporations and Government clearly need to establish many more retraining programs to enable workers to educate them selves for second careers. The Federal Government might pat tern such a program on the G.I. bill, while unions and industry could offer scholarships.

The new challenge lies in the fact that lower-middle-class whites and blacks actually share quite similar economic needs: better jobs, better schools, better services, better police protection, relief from taxes. Ideally, they should band to gether, employing their collective economic and political strength to advance their common interests. Is this Utopian?

Perhaps. The familiar psychology of "We made it; why can't they?" still blinds various ethnic groups -- Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians and lately many Jews -- to the more complex handicaps of black Americans. "The Poles had to feed their children, dress them and send them to school," says John Krawiec, editor of Chicago's Dziennik Zwiazkowy. "For centuries, our peasant ancestors were practically slaves too." The hostility of many lower-middle-class whites is compounded by the unspoken realization that, in fact, they have not really "made it" themselves.

All the same, prejudice is sometimes less overwhelming than it seems. Lately there have been flickers of promise -- scattered coalitions of blacks and working-class whites.

In the past, the most frequent interracial alliances in volved ghetto blacks and suburban whites. Many of these were false to the extent that the wealthier whites were per forming acts of noblesse oblige that infuriated the white lower middle class and often the blacks themselves. Now the Philadelphia Antipoverty Action Committee has dis covered that black-white alliances are possible where racial neighborhoods adjoin and share common dangers and demands. Thus, black and white parents last year formed a community-action committee that preserved GET SET, a pre school program that both groups felt their children urgently needed.

Some of Detroit's blacks and Polish Americans, rep resenting the city's largest minorities, are coming to gether, somewhat gingerly, to push for a ward system of elect ingcity council members, who are now elected at large.

Since a ward system would give both Negro and Polish voters more representation, the two groups are engaged in clas sic political trading for the benefit of both. Though prejudice remains high, there is now even talk of a joint cultural fair in Detroit, with soul food and Polish sausages.

Although the vigilante impulse has been stigmatized as part of a lynch-mob mentality, there is no intrinsic reason why blacks and whites should not cooperate in escort ser vices, for instance, or in demanding both more policemen and more humane police procedures. Such cooperative ventures are still far too rare to set a pattern; if anything, the cur rent trend indicates a discouraging deterioration. But the scattered alliances formed thus far suggest exciting possibilities -- and a clear challenge for unions, corporations and politicians at every level to work toward an atmosphere of tolerance based upon rational self-interest.

Whistle in Relief The anger in forgotten America has begun to express it self in politics. In addition to the Nixon election itself, it has influenced mayoralty votes from Los Angeles to Min neapolis to New York City (although each represented a spe cial situation that made its significance far from clear-cut).

Yet the backlash and indeed the "repression" that liberals and radicals talk about freely have not been nearly as se rious thus far as they might have been. George Wallace, for in stance, did far less well among Northern lower-middle-class whites than had been predicted. A TIME correspondent ex plains part of the reason: "I find the bitterness of these whites so deep, so widespread that I whistle in relief that they are not organized for action. Were they as cohesive as stu dents, as densely packed as ghetto Negroes, there is little rea son to doubt that sullenness would become confrontation."

If such confrontation is to be avoided in the long run, along with even deeper division between the races, for gotten America must be remembered in ways that unite rather than anger. 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; the problem is how to convince white workers that social change can benefit them and not just Negroes. Blacks, too, need to recognize that their self-interest lies not in sterile separatism but in new coalitions with working-class whites. The nation's leaders must not play off one group against the other, but must show that blacks can make gains even while lower-middle-class whites do too. This is an extremely difficult task -- perhaps impossible in the short run. Ultimately, it will require not only inspiring national leadership and a more efficient and equitable use of present resources, but also an in crease in those resources. It will be possible only if it becomes clear that in a growing American economy, amidst continuing American progress, there is enough of the good life for everyone.

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