The Confrontation of the Two Americas

THE country seemed in an odd, suspended mood. The great quadrennial division of the national house to elect or re-elect the President did not yet seem to have seriously begun--or else had already taken place so early and quietly that in effect there would be no real contest. Certainly the campaign has thus far failed to catch the national imagination, a fact that has something to do with the candidates who are running. There was little buoyancy and no euphoria in the American mood, but some of the stronger political poisons seemed to have been drained. The war, taxes, inflation, unemployment, the environment--no one could claim that these issues had disappeared, but they were festering less now. Some curious instauration of the '50s seemed to be at work in the psychology of 1972, almost a conscious revolt against the extravagant, Halloween '60s.

One saw it, for example, on the nation's campuses as the first fragrances of autumn suffused the air and the football season started. If the hair was often as long as before, there was also a deja vu of cardigans, Bass Weejuns and button-down collars. Fraternities were pursuing pledges as if Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis had never gone away. One recent night at George Washington University in Washington, the student rathskeller and the bowling alleys were jammed. Berkeley, cradle of the free speech movement, reverberated to the thock of tennis balls.

In large and small ways, the Republican political effort reflected and enhanced this mood. By campaigning little, Nixon suggests, as he means to, an air of ordered normalcy, of the business of the country going along as usual. When he does swing out on a rare foray, as he did last week to Texas, there are overtones of other days. His major remarks there were an old-fashioned scolding of "permissive" judges whose leniency from the bench in dealing with hard-drug traffickers is a "weak link" in the attack on the heroin problem. At one point during the trip, visiting a high school in Rio Grande City, he sat down at a piano like Harry Truman and banged out Happy Birthday on the old 88 for a Democratic host Congressman while the students chorused the words. In fact, of course, Nixon has moved way beyond the '50s politically and philosophically, as is shown by his major diplomatic moves of conciliation toward the Communist powers and a number of his domestic proposals. But in his manner and calculated appeal, he invites the electorate to come home to an earlier, no longer quite real America.

In contrast, the McGovern campaign marches to the rhythms of the long, Wagnerian '60s: the blacks' upheaval, the war and the defense machine, a generation's uprising (or dropping out), the industrial-ecological dilemma, the battle for privacy, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution. It was in this context that McGovern's candidacy was shaped and his nomination became possible. For McGovern and his people it is not possible after such events to envision the nation relapsing quietly into some smooth semblance of the middle Eisenhower years. Too much has changed. Another awareness, another America was born in those years of the last decade.

Rot. Hurting in morale and above all for money because of his bad showing in the polls, McGovern lashed out: "I think the polls are a lot of rot. I think they make these things up in the back room." Nonetheless, he released his own poll, which showed his cause not nearly so hopelessly behind as the general surveys. Touring the big cities last week, sometimes he was the angry, fundamentalist McGovern. Holding aloft a U.S. pineapple bomb in Philadelphia, he cried, "Does it increase our honor because the color of the bodies has been changed from white to yellow? Their blood is still red. They are still children under God." Before an assembly of unionists in Detroit, where antibusing sentiment runs high, he was uncompromising. With the exception of the war, McGovern said, "there is no darker chapter in the presidency of Richard Nixon than his exploitation of the difficult questions and emotions surrounding this issue of busing."

So far, McGovern's call to moral arms is going largely unanswered. It is as if the comfortable had closed ranks against the claims and the calls to conscience put forward by the less fortunate, or were at least arguing that their approach would ultimately most benefit all. And the comfortable seemed to be in the majority in the fall of 1972. They are in rebellion against the mass consciousness raising attempted by the protesters of the '60s, and weary too of the depredations of youth culture and the S.D.S., the noise of rock carmagnole and the further anarchisms of the "do it" ethic of Rubin and Hoffman. In the adolescence of 19th century Romanticism, the French Poet Theophile Gautier proclaimed: Plutot la barbarie que I'ennui. Now the American mood would reverse the formula: better boredom than that new barbarism. Says Sociology Professor Robert K. Merton of Columbia University: "What McGovern faces is a cumulative counterreaction to much of the mass protests of the last few years, and he is being penalized for them. He is representing the wave, in the short run, not of the future but of the recent past."

Choice. McGovern is trying to fight his way clear of association with past radical excess. As he told a group of New Jersey labor leaders almost apologetically: "It's nothing radical to call this nation to the principles on which it was founded." The central theme of his candidacy, he argues, is not that darker side of the '60s, but the decade's loftier impulses: civil rights, equality, more open and humane government, the older and classically Democratic concern for the little man against special interests and corporations. In those enthusiasms he has had a wider following, and probably a firmer hold on the future, than his polls would indicate. It was Nixon who first declared that the election offered the clearest choice of the century--and McGovern quickly and happily agreed. Both candidates may have been right. What seems to have intervened is McGovern's personal failure.

Professor Sidney Hook of New York University believes that the country is ready for most of McGovern's domestic proposals, but that "what peopie fear most is his unpredictability." Or, as a Princeton student told an interviewer scornfully: "You can say that I'm 1,000% behind McGovern." In modifying his stands on some issues, in failing to control his staff, particularly in the Eagleton affair, whose negative resonance across the country still haunts McGovern to a remarkable degree, the Democratic nominee emerged in the public view as an ineffectual leader and manager. Indeed, his seeming ineptness may well have become the issue obscuring all others, thus diluting the purity of the "clearest choice in a century" between two programs and philosophies. If McGovern is turning off the voters to the extent that the latest polls suggest, it is nearly impossible to determine to what degree they are resisting his program--or their perception of it--and to what extent they merely distrust his effectiveness as a leader.

McGovern's program as amended is actually less radical than many voters seem to think; with some exceptions, it is a quantitative extension of past Democratic propositions, and in some areas it comes quite close to Richard Nixon's own plans. But the two men are nonetheless each embodiments of ideas larger than either of their somewhat unprepossessing personalities. They represent different instincts about America. In their casts of characters and processes, the Republican and Democratic conventions this year said much of it. They suggested almost two different countries, two different cultures, two different Americas.

In the face of the ruinous polls, where is the McGovern America? McGovern apparently commands a majority of only the college young, the blacks and the Jews. But the McGovern constituency, actual and potential, is not a matter of race, economic class or education. Like Nixon, McGovern has support among millionaires, blue-collar workers, suburbanites--not nearly so much as the President of course. But it may be that as an idea, an instinct, the McGovern phenomenon is more wide spread than the polls indicate. "In a broad sense," writes Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "the election of 1972 will be the politics of authority and the Establishment versus the politics of change. If McGovern is right on the currents of change, his appeal will reach into every part of our society."

Republicans smile at such thinking as a species of selfdelusion. Nixon, they argue, is just now in the process of mobilizing an extraordinary new G.O.P. coalition from blocs pirated from, or abandoned by the Democrats--the South, Catholic ethnics, blue-collar workers, the noncollege young--along with more traditional Republican voters. Says Kevin Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority: "McGovern represents a new radical elite that has taken control of the Democratic Party and alienated much of the traditional party structure in the process."

The ideas of the two Americas can be found deeply laminated in the characters of the candidates themselves. It may be, as TIME'S Hugh Sidey observes, that the difference is rooted in the Sunday schools of Yorba Linda, Calif., and Mitchell, S. Dak. Richard Nixon was the Quaker, sitting in a tiny loft room with a few neighborhood children beside his father, who was the teacher. The children were taught to look inward. The emphasis was on the individual, what he felt, what he could and should do. Each person created his own world.

For George McGovern, there was the constant cry for self-sacrifice, to reach out beyond oneself to help and teach and preach. Personal striving was part of it, but people should be uplifters, missionaries, and should share with the poor, comfort the bereaved.

In youth, Nixon carved out his commercial and educational way in a California that was luminous with opportunity, even in Depression days. The Nixons worked hard and suffered, but always there was opportunity through discipline. Sheltered but driven, he was molded by the society of merchants in which he developed.

Out in George McGovern's prairie, the dreams faded in the '20s. Mitchell would never be Detroit. For some reason--climate, falling farm prices, no jobs--people left South Dakota. Instead of the sunny optimism that glowed through the hard years in California, there was little more than grasshoppers and blizzards in answer to the prayers of country parsons. They were people who felt overpowered not only by the elements but by other men. McGovern saw it from the front pew, saw it when he hunted rabbits over the parched countryside. Always there were the Scriptures ringing in his head--someone worse off to be helped, someone more unhappy to cheer.

Nixon went after personal achievement and material success. Life became a contest where the strong and persistent endured, the controlled and clever won the field. Each person looked out for himself and his, worried about his own life more than his neighbor's. Horatio Alger may have entered McGovern's life, but not nearly so much as the apostle Peter. If there was endurance and struggle and self-improvement, it was often related to other people or grander designs. In those small towns of Depression days the churches taught history through the Bible and the music that came out of musty pump organs. There was the faint whiff of adventure from the missionary letters. So McGovern went out to serve people and to understand the world a little better.

Neglect. Not much has really changed in the two men since they both went off to war. They learned their arts, studied their legislative and political crafts. But Nixon sees the world as an arena of individual initiative, where each man is expected to do all he can within his abilities. His nation, he still insists, is a place of almost limitless opportunity where hard work and brains can bring a man wealth or power, which translate very easily with Nixon into happiness. George McGovern still sees the world as a place of natural cruelties, where strong men are supposed to help others before themselves.

In the world of the presidency, Nixon believes that the people can pretty much run themselves if left alone. A spirit of laissez-faire--to the point of "benign neglect"--suffuses his thinking. Thus a major purpose of Washington is to guard against too much governmental encroachment. It is ironic that under Nixon, the Government has imposed economic controls and grown bigger than ever. But he believes that he has stirred more initiative in the courthouses and state capitols.

In a more missionary spirit, McGovern would use government as a moral force to create equal rights, to give to the poor, to provide jobs for the jobless, food for the hungry, security for families that cannot compete, medical care for the old and the very young. He sees government as the problem solver. His view is fundamentally domestic, concentrated on the problems around him that he can see and hear and understand. The foreign scene tends to intrude only in cases like Viet Nam, which he feels is a moral outrage that has depleted the nation's resources.

Nixon, in his preoccupation with personal achievement, with toughness and endurance, assumes finally that almost every American has had the same open field before him as he has had. Classic competitive liberalism too often leaves little room for compassion. His best friends are self-made millionaires. His inner sense of America harbors no place for failure and limited room for mistakes. Work is all. "Because I believe in human dignity," Nixon has said, "I am against a guaranteed annual wage. If we were to underwrite everybody's income, we would be undermining everybody's character." Yet he himself has proposed a guaranteed annual income. He admires strength, both moral and physical, and equates negotiating strength with military power.

Privacy. Nixon calls them "the old values"--parental authority, a stand against permissiveness, law-and-order before civil rights. In the process he has presided over increasing surveillance and broader arrest patterns. Despite his praise for traditional values, the question of privacy has been submerged in the fight against crime and subversion. He too often lacks compassion and equates conformity with conscience. He is apt to ignore basic changes occurring in the U.S. by simply conjuring up an image of national wellbeing, perhaps a sentimentalized vision emanating from the America of his young manhood.

McGovern's America, by contrast, is tinged with Utopia--a land of peace and prosperity. The rich would still be rich, but a lot less so. The poor would be poor no more. The hungry would be fed, the unemployed would have work, crime would be curbed, schools and hospitals built and the drug pushers jailed. There would be no war, but the nation's defenses would remain strong. Aid for Israel, but none for Viet Nam. The environment would be cleansed. Inflation would end.

It is a glowing vision, but is it realistically attainable? And if so, how much would it cost to sustain it? Most of his life, McGovern has been an influencer, a talker, a thinker. He has the visionary sense, but his campaign thus far reflects his distaste for details, for organization--a quality that has disturbed many American voters, even among his own followers.

Each candidate has a resonance to his own America. Within each constituency, voters repeat their candidate's themes and even rhetoric with a precision that is sometimes eerie. A one-word common denominator prevails in the Nixonian America: the sense of "system." The free enterprise system, the law-and-order system, even the "family unit" system--they are the recurring images among Nixon supporters. Their antonym is "chaos," not Utopia. They are apprehensive of the disorders that the late '60s adumbrated to them, the turmoils that they suspect a McGovern accession might bring.

In two weeks spent in interviewing Nixon supporters across the nation, TIME Correspondent Champ Clark found that "Nixonians are not against change. I have yet to meet one who wants the U.S. to stay exactly the way it is. But they have in kindred spirit a sense of orderliness, of tidiness. They are fond of saying that their political stance is 'evolutionary, not revolutionary.' It was in this meaning that Richard Frank, vice president of Schenley Distillers, Inc., rolled his eyes heavenward and summed up his political desires: 'Please don't rain on my parade.' "

The Nixon nation is a varied and obviously populous place. The issues of the campaign, strangely enough, strike little fire--the talk is apt to be more of principles. Where Nixon supporters do discuss issues, their opinions tend toward the predictable: "peace with honor" in a war that the President inherited and is only trying to end--just don't turn it over to the Communists overnight. (It is interesting that the word Commie has all but disappeared from the political lexicon.) No amnesty for draft resisters. Busing is bad, or else does not matter much any more.

Nixonians generally are against wage and price controls in principle. But in practice they are not so sure. Mc-Govern's economics, they agree, would be disastrous, especially the Senator's proposals to tax capital gains as regular income. Welfare arouses even more emotion--against it. A retired Floridian summed up the Nixonian attitude: "Give 'em a shovel."

>Ewell Pope is a 44-year-old self-made Atlanta millionaire who came back from Korea with a Silver Star, a

Purple Heart and a lucidly aggressive desire to "aspire and achieve in the system." Today he is a partner in Crow, Pope & Land Enterprises, one of Atlanta's largest real estate developers. Having grown up on a tiny Georgia farm, he feels entitled to declare: "This country has always been a place where anyone who was willing to work at it could rise up to some degree." He is antiracist: "If someone asked my wife to sit in the back of the bus, I'd be the meanest man alive." He explains part of the reason he is voting for Nixon: "The political values of this country are mainly middleclass. Because this group believes in human rights, people have sometimes been too anxious to right any human wrong that occurs, and they have given the Federal Government powers to go in and right what seems wrong at the time. But you are never going to get those powers back from the Federal Government. I have been in almost every country in the world by now. Every time I get a little bit upset with our system, I can still come back and marvel at how great it is."

>Paul Berg, 19, of Seattle, Wash., was one of the Young Voters for the President who cheered from the galleries in Miami Beach last month. A student at Shoreline Community College, he works part-time tending pumps at a local gas station. Berg is one of the thousands of young voters with whom the Republicans mean to disabuse the McGovernites about their hold on the young. "I never went in for protests or demonstrations," Berg says, "but some of my friends did. The country has broken out of its low point. In 1968-70, everybody seemed down on the United States. But now I think the country is getting back on its feet. We've got a good system, you know. I do wish we had a little more patriotism. I don't mean 'America--love it or leave it,' or anything like that. But just a little more pride in our country."

>G.S. Donnell, 62, sold out his North Carolina oil-truck fleet two years ago and retired to Fort Lauderdale, where he lives with his wife in a stylish condominium apartment. "After I retired," he says, "we traveled all over the United States in a station wagon, sleeping on the ground in sleeping bags. I know this nation. I have felt it. I have smelled it. It is a beautiful country, and it has got a good system. I am a strong believer in earning what you get. This is what life is all about."

> Michael O'Neil, 43, emigrated from Ireland 20 years ago, now works as a carpenter in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. He voted for John Kennedy in 1960, but this year is going for Nixon. "This ultraliberal bit is just too much," he says. "You know, promising people the sun and the moon when you know you can't give it to them. My nephew lost his life in Viet Nam. He believed in being over there, in living up to the responsibility of large countries to help little ones. It's like living in the neighborhood around here in Flushing. When a neighbor has trouble, you help out where you can."

> Sanford Fray, 58, a black optometrist in Harlem, disputes the Democrats' complete hold on black Americans. "Our country needs a strong President if we are to survive," he says, explaining why he favors Nixon. "There is no doubt in my mind that McGovern will get a lot of votes in Harlem, it being a heavy welfare area. But America didn't become great by the inhabitants sitting down and stretching their hands out to the Federal Government. You know, I can't get an errand boy. It's more profitable to be on welfare."

If in Nixon's America the language tends to be angular and mechanical, to speak of systems and order, in McGovern's nation it is a more humanistic vocabulary of "decency," "compassion" and "integrity." The idea of "a restoration of faith in government" recurs, a vaguely spiritual impulse focusing on confidence and trust. If Nixonians talk of what is "right with the country," McGovernites almost by definition are impelled by a sense of what is wrong with it and what could be better. They express a sense of the U.S. gone awry, of government wrested from the people to serve unholy ends--a war the people did not want, or corporate privilege.

In two weeks of interviews in McGovern's America, TIME'S Gregory Wierzynski found that the operative word is almost always "tone"--to change the tone of government, of the country. A young McGovern pollster, Pat Caddell, explained his feelings: "It is more a question of moral leadership than of program. It is the goal of reconciliation and salvation, of the spirit he gives the country more than the bills he proposes or programs he initiates." Yet if McGovern's America is a reflection of his personality, the man himself evokes none of the adulation that characterized, say, the John and Robert Kennedy campaigns, or even the Eugene McCarthy campaign. Even among his own faithful, he comes across as a cool and somewhat distant figure, perhaps a touch pedestrian. No waves of shrieking teen-agers engulf him; his cuff links are always in place when he emerges from a crowd.

> David Benway, 37, of Excelsior, Minn., a salesman for a mail-order printing house, voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. But in 1968, he explains, "I was in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. I took three days off and wandered around the riot zones and listened to McCarthy. I became very despondent about the machine, the whole state of affairs. I started listening to the kids and to McCarthy, and I got very excited. Now we're [he and his wife] active in the ecology movement." Benway favors busing: "I want my kids exposed to blacks, and to poor blacks. I think it would be nothing but good." But the basis of his support for McGovern is Benway's commitment to "total nonviolence." Says he: "Kids with guns aren't allowed in our yard. We're trying to stress that we feel killing is bad." He sees an ethic of militarism in Nixon: "We're supposedly a democracy, and yet we're approaching an authoritarian state here."

>Samuel Koffler, 66, is a dapper Chicago importer who grew up in a Jewish enclave of Harlem. He has donated $1,000 to the McGovern campaign and plans to give more. "What concerns me," he says, "is that Nixon and his Government treat us as chattels, as if this country were their own special province and they lead us to do what is right for them. We are spending $80 billion a year on defense, and frankly I don't feel any safer." The specifics of McGovern's proposals don't concern Koffler. "I've learned not to pay attention to campaign oratory," he explains. "My feeling is only that McGovern is to be trusted. To me, McGovern represents the good, solid, wholesome America around which our traditions were built. Rather than putting billions into destroying Viet Nam, think what a wonderful country this would be if we invested the same amount into jobs and hospitals and housing."

> Harold Willens, 58, calls himself "a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist." A wealthy Los Angeles realtor, he started out in utter poverty. "McGovern," says Willens, "is a man whose concerns are deeply human and deeply moral. As things are, we are putting our money where our myths are--like the myth of the domino theory--and we napalm little children and contravene the ideals for which this country was founded. We have lost our soul in Indochina, and this has created a fantastic crisis of confidence. People have lost faith in their Government, and the economy depends on confidence in our democracy." Nixon, says Willens, "is looking at the world through a rear-view mirror. Meantime these devastating problems are creeping up on us. We need leadership that's interested in the country and the world rather than its own hang-ups--cliches like not being the first President to lose a war." Nor is Willens concerned that McGovern's tax policies would ruin his own fortune. "We will get what we pay for," he says. "Not an extra mink coat for Mrs. Willens, but more stability and the survival of the system that I love and that has worked for me. We must share in order to keep."

> Golfrey Connally, 53, is a liberal economics professor at Texas' San Antonio College. He is also the younger brother of former Treasury Secretary John Connally, who now heads Democrats for Nixon. Golfrey and Brother John do not see eye to eye on the presidential campaign. "Nixon," says Golfrey Connally, "is a master of the art of manipulation--equating patriotism with support of his policies. By implication, critics are subversives." Nixon understands the public fear of dramatic change, says Golfrey Connally, "but there is no alternative to coming to grips with the complex issues. Nixon cannot talk away rising crime or worsening trade imbalance or never-ending wars. The divisiveness of this Administration --openly pitting rich against poor, old against young, white against black--is unprecedented in our time. Nixon and his board-chairman friends are usually cynics who believe society to be incapable of much improvement."

> Marjorie Benton, 37, is the daughter-in-law of former Connecticut Senator William Benton, the publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Active in politics since the first Adlai Stevenson campaign, she has been an effective Mc-Govern fund raiser, drumming up over $1,000,000 from wealthy acquaintances and friends. "There are a lot of people being left out of the benefits of the society," she argues. "Benefits such as being able to get off welfare and get a job. To have decent cities and play areas and unpolluted lakes. It sounds Utopian, but I really feel that way. I feel very privileged, and I just wish everyone had as much as I do. And I'm willing to give up something and try to have that happen. Money is a product of society, and I really feel that you owe it back to society."

Harvard Sociologist David Riesman sees the McGovern constituency as an expression of the anti-institutional force that has long existed in American life --a force today heavily represented in the press, the advertising community and the liberal Protestant and emancipated Catholic clergy. Says Riesman: "Their attitudes have strong roots in frontier anarchism and feelings of independence"--though it is a frontier and an independence quite different from Nixon's version.

Riesman argues that the McGovern constituency is basically a professional elite but "is not part of the institutional, organizational, day-by-day America. They don't think this America is really necessary, that it can all be done mechanically. They have very little sense of that other day-by-day America." It may be that McGovernites, in espousing income redistribution and higher inheritance taxes, have profoundly misjudged the American character and some of its deepest aspirations. Even some of McGovern's own supporters use the curious argument that such proposals are not to be taken entirely seriously because, after all, Congress would still be there to put the brakes on any idea it thought too radical.

As an example of that lack of touch with the other America, Riesman cites the abortion issue. "It was madness to confront the country with it at the convention," he says. "It's an issue of great importance to liberated women--and others of course--but think of the unliberated women. For many of them the right to get an abortion simply means that they have no way of holding on to their men when they get pregnant. A considerable part of the blue-collar and farm population only gets married when the girls get pregnant." That tactical judgment is quite aside from the moral substance of the question which matters greatly to many people who consider abortion simply wrong. Nor is abortion in any sense a significant campaign issue; McGovern's present official stand is the same as Nixon's--the matter should be left to the states to decide --and there is no doubt that in the near future the U.S., as a whole, will allow women to have abortions more or less at will. To Riesman, the whole question is simply an illustration of how Mc-Govern comes across to the voters.

Robert Coles, a psychiatrist who has written sympathetically of Middle America, suggests that the electorate as a whole is very much like the individual voter. "In every person," he says, "there are various contradictions and ambiguities. These shift, and in an election it is as if magnets were pulling them one way or the other." Desires for peace or better education or tax justice or income redistribution are balanced against anxieties about change, about losing what one already has.

In Coles' view, the dissatisfaction with the war, inflation, unemployment, the cost of living, political espionage and the like--all these strands could have been seized by a Democratic candidate and woven into a decisive electoral majority. In some ways, Nixon himself made this possible by his dealings with Russia and China, removing in Coles' phrase "the connection between social changes and some sinister foreign force." Coles and many other observers believe that McGovern has been trapped on the left and is in the nearly impossible position of having to move convincingly toward the center. Some other candidates, such as F.D.R. and Robert Kennedy, started in the center and moved progressively left, drawing their constituencies with them.

"There is no section of the country," says Coles, "where complaints and difficulties and a yearning for something better doesn't exist. Most people still want to vote for the Democratic Party, but they are afraid that the party is not what they want it to be, that some odd sector of the party has seized control."

Weary. So for the moment, the Nixonian star is ascendant--not so much because the President has captured and guided the nation's imagination but almost by default. Indeed, there are those who suspect that this election has as much to do with 1976 as 1972: an enormous Nixon victory might enhance the party's post-Nixon chances four years hence.

For this year, neither candidate so far has been much of a national inspiration. In fact, it may be that the American people themselves are far ahead of both Nixon and McGovern--more conservative perhaps than they used to be but weary of simplicities on both sides. Within the two Americas, one common denominator is a sophistication in the people that neither candidate has been respecting very much, and beyond that, there is a desire for one America rather than two--something that neither candidate seems capable of meeting.

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