What the campaign is trying to do is exert the same kind of pressure on Congress as special interests have been exerting for nearly 200 years. If that is blackmail, then the Congress ought to be used to it.
The difference, of course, is that there is latent in the Poor People's demands, a threat of violence. But to associate the violence and the campaign is absurd. There will be violence this summer anyway; there will surely be blood and looting. The campaign was conceived as a way to provide a possible alternative to that violence, if only by making efficient political use of the threat of violence.
Hardly Radical
The campaign is hardly revolutionary. In fact, it is so un-revolutionary as to be almost farcical. At a time when it can be clearly seen that the American system has failed 20 per cent of the people of this country, the poor people still want to get into that system.
V.O. Key writes in Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, "To carve out a place for itself in the politico-social order, a new group may have to fight for reorientation of many of the values of the order." To a surprising degree, the Poor People's Campaign is not fighting for this reorientation.
The programs that SCLC describes as "goals" are hardly radical. Its idea of guaranteed income is only for "those either too young, too old, or too handicapped to work." They merely want welfare spruced up, more efficient. Their demands for jobs have already been proposed by the Johnson Administration. The Poor People's Campaign, then, is a struggle to get in, a struggle to educate, not a struggle to force America to accept a radically new kind of society.
That Congress misunderstands the campaign is not at all surprising. Congress has always had a Neanderthal brain in matters of social change. But the campaign is lacking in popular support also. The liberal money that normally backs adventures like this one is going to Kennedy and McCarthy; an election year is a bad time for a Poor People's Campaign.
More than that, people with contacts in Washington can sense the mood of that city well--it is vicious. Washington in May--in any other year a beautiful place for a campaign--is in 1968 angry and gloomy and brutal.
Washington is not only a nation's capital, it is coincidentally a city--a city that had a riot last month, and since that riot a crime wave. A few recent examples of Washington's mood include:
* A bus driver was murdered in a holdup Friday, touching off a short strike. Drivers first demanded a policeman on every bus, now may settle for curtailment of all service after 10 p.m. Bus robberies are double last year's pace.
* A group of businessmen, burned out in the April riot, have hired nationally prominent attorney Edward Bennett Williams, to look into the possibility of suing the city for damages. Police did not, fire at looters, and troops were not brought in soon enough--the same old stuff.
* Park and Shop, Inc., representing the most powerful of the District's business interests, took out a full-page advertisement in the newspapers demanding more protection from the city and asking that "troops be placed on duty to supplement the policy forces prior to and during" the campaign.
* The House District Committee last week called Washington Public Safety Director Patrick V. Murphy on the carpet and demanded to know why police would not shoot rioters.
* Since the riot, Washington restaurants have lost $40 million in business. Tourism, the District's staple, has taken a plunge. After dark the downtown streets are nearly empty.
Meanwhile, a progressive-minded but basically impotent city government has issued a 44-page report on the April riot, calling for many of the programs suggested in the Kerner Report and emphasizing more local control of businesses in the ghetto. But the city government appears to be in a less powerful position than the interests that have always run Washington (Park and Shop and friends) through the Congressional committees.
Beyond that, the city is not ready for reconciliation, much less progress. It is above all scared and vicious. That is not a good environment for any kind of campaign. It is a horrible environment for a disorganized campaign that is not sure where it is going.
It is sad that no one recognizes that this campaign is a last chance, that soon poor people will no longer want to get in. They will be fed up with that. It is sad that they are not getting help and it is sad that Congress misunderstands them and the city of Washington hates and fears them.
But listen to who they are if you wonder what will happen next. A black man testifying at the City Council hearings after the April riot said it: "This is my feeling. I am frustrated, I am angry, and I am mad.