Even Julian Bond, who had met the previous weekend with McGovern and Gary Hart in Washington, guardedly expressed misgivings about the prenomination pact with McGovern: "It was easier for us to deliver to him than for him to deliver to us," he said.
A major factor in black disenchantment with McGovern was that he was failing to deliver the voter registration money and the campaign jobs that blacks had been promised. The procedure for this pre-election patronage was supposed to be that McGovern, in addition to hiring them for positions of authority within his own national voter registration campaign, would induce his contributors to donate funds to nonprofit, officially non-partisan voter registration groups on the local and regional levels. The particular groups that were to receive these channeled funds would be chosen by the black political figures who were the main McGovern operatives in different parts of the country.
In the South this was Julian Bond, and he chose as his pet political charities the Voter Education Project and the Youth Citizenship Fund. "In the South, there's only one group that effectively registers older black voters, and that's the VEP. And, there's only one group that effectively registers young people, and that's the Youth Citizenship Fund." Bond explains. However, perhaps also influencing Bond's choice of charities was the fact that James Bond. Julian's younger brother, heads the southeastern region of the YCF and that John Lewis, the former head of SNCC and a close crony of Julian's since their days together in the movement, is director of the VEP. This is not to suggest that Bond was motivated by nepotism alone, for, as he says, the YCF and the VEP are the best in their business, but it is indicative of the fact that an inner circle of black political figures made the pact with McGovern and were in the best position to profit from it.
However, as a result of the Fagleton crisis and Big Labor's break with McGovern. McGovern has had trouble enough trying to get the money he needs to pay his own workers, not to mention get his campaign contributors to donate money he needs to live up to his pledges. Consequently, neither the VEP nor YCF has yet to receive any of the promised funds from McGovern.
"You have to understand," said one McGovern campaign official, "that this is not the Republican party. If anybody hasn't been getting any money, it's because there's no money for them to get."
But the conflict between the McGovern campaign and blacks to whom it owes political debts is more than the product of the politics of poverty--more than an unsurprising consequence of the sheer feet that McGovern does not have they money to pay those debts off. When Louis Stokes said, "We've been screwed again," he was talking about more than money. No one ever supported George McGovern in hopes of getting rich by doing so. What Stokes was talking about is the fact that the McGovern campaign held out the promise of providing blacks with an opportunity of really getting into the business of politics--which is, as Julian Bond said, the business of deciding who will get what from whom--and he has as yet failed to live up to that promise.
In this context, it is far more significant that McGovern has gone against the advice of his Chicago operatives both black and white, including Jesse Jackson, and has endorsed the reelection of Cook Country DA Edward Hanrahan or that he is about to similarly disregard the pleas of many of his workers and supporters in Boston and endorse Louise Day Hicks, than it is that he is failing to produce the money promised to the VEP or the YCF.
In fact, perhaps it is as Julian Bond says: "The tragedy of black people in the election of 1972 is that there are few ways for us to go. Before the convention, there was McGovern, Muskie, Humphrey, and Shirley Chisholm. Now, it's reduced down to McGovern and Nixon."
So, it is. Such is the nature of the process of deciding who will get what from whom. Still, at the point of ultimate reduction stands McGovern. There is no alternative to consider.