Mr. Jones: "I can help you a lot" he says when I ask him what people are thinking about the primary. "I've lived a lot of places in this country, my wife's from Pennsylvania, and I think I'm a pretty typical fellow." He seems a hard man, with dark black hair and a dirty t-shirt. He was for Lindsay, he tells me, and waits to enjoy my surprise. "I believe what the country needs is an all-round liberal man, but if Lindsay is dropping out, I'm for Wallace because he's against this forced busin' and he's the only one who is." There's a lot he doesn't like about Wallace though, having lived for a while in Alabama under his high sales tax. He sees through Nixon; that China trip was a stunt, he says, and we are leaving Vietnam without having finished the job--plus getting licked too.

Mr. Graves: Outside his house is parked an old sky-blue school bus bearing the words "Freewill Independent Baptist Church" and, on the back, bumper stickers: "Jesus Saves," "Have You Read Your Bible Today?" Mr. Graves has the gentle, fearful eyes of a ten-year-old but the brown weathered skin of a life-long construction worker. He seems afraid I will scold him for what he tells me. He mumbles a bit when he says he's for Wallace, but his embarrassment is not doubt. Busing comes up quickly: "You can't change a hundred years--or more I guess--in ten." He's afraid his kids will be beaten up if they go to the public schools and for this reason--and "for religion"--he sends them to one of the new white private schools. Freedom of choice--he just can't understand why that isn't enough. You can't change people's hearts by laws: "You can't lead a mule to water, but boy you shore can't make that rascal drink."

At first he touches religion only gingerly, afraid to offend me. But I press him. Does he think religion ought to be carried into politics? He does, and with real emotion he claims that he puts love of Jesus Christ and belief in the truth of the King James version of the Bible above anything else, even his family. He drives the school bus to Sunday school, and guesses that the reason he doesn't like even the word liberal comes from his belief in religion, his faith that the old King James version is the only true one. And when he learns that, no, I am not saved, his comment is straight from Pascal: "Well if I'm right I've gained everything, and if I'm not, well then what have I lost? But you've lost everything either way when you die."

He has no job now, and knows that the men who are hurting are not the skilled union men who get five dollars an hour--he thinks those unions ought to be taken down a notch or two--but the hundred-dollar-a-week men with a family to support. But mainly he's concerned about foreign policy, and keeping up our defenses. "If a man tries to take something from you, you ought to be strong enough to put the hurt on him." Wallace is right on the war: you know we could have won it in sixty days if we hadn't held back.

IV

BACK IN RALEIGH, I wait for an interview at the headquarters, and down a Pepsi--another popular Southern invention. The big man working at the gas station gets gruff when I ask him how many people he's seen going in over there. "I hope nobody does, I hope nobody votes for that son-of-a-bitch. I'm for Humphrey," and he roars with laughter. Should I believe him?

Lewis Purdy, county co-ordinator for the campaign, a tall, gray-haired businessman whom I thought must be a deacon, predicts that Wallace will win with 40-55 per cent of the vote and that Sanford will be forced to fulfill his promise of dropping out if he "couldn't beat George Wallace." Purdy lists his candidate's appeals, focusing on busing and economics. He mentions corporations but more directly "these multi-billion dollar foundations using their money to foment revolution and subsidize these way-out, left things." He raises the familiar, often accurate charge of press hostility and neglect toward Wallace.

While I'm at the headquarters, several state workers on lunch break come in, take literature and stickers but refuse to sign the register. They are afraid of losing their jobs, they say, and when I talk to others, down near the capitol, they too look wary and refuse to comment on the election.

V

THESE STATE WORKERS, many of them with rural backgrounds, are among those filling the new apartments and shopping centers now replacing the pine forests at the city's edge. All over the state, the new suburbanites represent a crucial segment for this election. The poor whites are frustrated enough to give Wallace firm support. The real contest is for the loyalty of those who, if they vote for Wallace, will be silent about it, who, as Larry O'Brien has said, keep the Wallace vote in their gut.

While the poor whites simply cling to the more comfortable past with a blind desperation, these new suburbanites are painfully split. They see the America which shaped them and taught them to love her receding into the past along with their rural heritage, but the change is partly of their own choice, and that is their dilemma. They have come to the city to become middle-class, to escape the country's simplicity, coarseness, and poverty, but the country still lingers in them, and compels nostalgia. Along with the wealth and sophistication of the city have come new problems which conflict with these people's original simple goals, goals which were conceived in the country. If the rural legacy in them should suddenly emerge, what they have gained in the city will still make them ashamed.

The new middle class, feeling squeezed between institutions on top and the rising minorities below, must justify its accomplishment by a particular social myth. It must idealize the simpler, more in- dividualistic society of the past. It must reject racial equality because it symbolizes the new changes. It must yearn for the real uniformity and closeness of the old society and pretend that they still exist: there would not be such loyalty to the myth of the neighborhood school if the new suburbs really were neighborhoods of the old type.

These people cannot accept busing and welfare because they cannot accept ideas of social determination, differing family backgrounds, or restrictive monopoly, without endangering the basic myth behind their own social mobility and their right to enjoy its rewards. To preserve this myth, they must deny the complexity of contemporary society.

VI

A FEW DAYS LATER, the Raleigh News and Observer, one of those few grand old, staunchly liberal Southern papers, prints a forceful editorial depicting the coming primary as a "Dixie Classic," pitting Terry Sanford versus George Wallace (for now these were the only real choices), and a New South against the Old.