By 1970 journalists, academics, and the middle class public believed that working whites had recently become more aggressively racist and more politically conservative. There was really more continuity than change in white working-class politics, however. Urban white working people retained a strong sense of commitment toward neighborhood, religious, and ethnic institutions, and they remained convinced that theirs were “mainstream” institutions. By 1970 that seemed no longer to be the case. What had changed fundamentally in the 1960s was the context within which working whites honored those personal and community commitments made long ago.

Blue-collar discontent became more visible in the 1960s because it was then that blue collarites began to realize that the greatest threats to their parochial world were national, not local in origin. In the 1940s and 1950s local action had been the first recourse in combating challenges to the blue-collar working-class community. But in the 1960s the ability of “liberal” politicians, theoreticians, and Supreme Court justices to disrupt the daily life of the white working class became clear. It was still possible to resist the incursions of “outsiders” coming into blue-collar communities and telling people how to live, but the fight was increasingly futile: the outsiders seemed to possess the legitimacy that only the powerful could bestow. The old wells of white working-class political power had seemingly dried up, and the search for new ones could only take place in the public realm. As the rights revolution swung into full gear, and other groups pressed noisily for their due, working whites realized, not unreasonably, that to stay quiescent was to remain powerless.

At the same time, the message now reaching the nation’s ears was qualitatively different from that enunciated in the neighborhoods and cities of 1950s America. It was in the 1960s that particularized grievances with the actions and aspirations of blacks were overshadowed by a more generalized resentment of the abdication of responsible political leadership by those in power. In the clamor for rights—an easy way to make gains, blue collarites believed—too many had renounced their obligations and the hard work that went with them. It had been a cornerstone of white working-class political culture that it was the proper role of government not to provide for the people, but to enable citizens to discharge their responsibilities to the community. By the late 1960s it seemed abundantly clear that liberal political leaders were not only failing to demand responsible behavior from all Americans, they were encouraging lawlessness and irresponsibility by some.

This realization was an important one. It impelled working whites to re-evaluate the words and ideas through which they sought to recapture what had been lost. In peeling away the dead integument of white supremacy, they set free an old but enduring language of populism. In its revitalized form this populist appeal encapsulated blue-collar concerns and validated them in ways older appeals could not. By the end of the decade, white working-class discontent had become focused on the threat posed to “working” people—regardless of race—by the irresponsible actions of powerful elites. Blue collarites had largely abandoned race talk and were enunciating their concerns in populist language that had long been in the mainstream of American political discourse. They condemned the threat posed to the industrious and responsible many by a privileged and untrustworthy few. And what the anticommunist episode indicated, the events of the sixties seemed to confirm: the elites to be feared and fought lay in the halls of government, not the boardrooms of corporate America.

This is not to say that overt white racism and the deep working-class commitment to whiteness disappeared. Race-based resentment was often not far from the surface and some whites retained forthrightly “white supremacist” views, but the complex relationship between race, class, politics, and language was reconfigured. As the quality of urban life declined under mounting crime, as black activists grew increasingly militant in their actions and their language, and as “mainstream” politicians grew increasingly tolerant of these changes and even seemed to promote them, working whites became convinced that their problem was not racial but cultural. By the end of the sixties they were fighting not over turf, but over culture; not over black and white, but over right and wrong. And when urban working-class Democrats came to these conclusions, the suburban Republican was already there.

Baltimore’s municipal swimming pools had been desegregated in 1956. Some observers expected racial conflict, but little materialized. Most blacks swam at the Druid Hill pool, near the newly black neighborhoods in the northwest. A few ventured to other pools, but there were no significant disputes in the 1950s. One reason for this was that whites stayed home. Public pool attendance dropped precipitously in 1956 and stayed low throughout the 1950s.³ More important, at the pools, as elsewhere, de facto segregation reigned—black swimmers stayed out of recognized white neighborhoods.⁴ The NAACP decided to put this unofficial segregation to the test at Riverside Park in the heart of South Baltimore.

In mid-August 1962 children and teens from the black neighborhoods northwest of South Baltimore started swimming at Riverside Pool under the watchful eye of the NAACP. On Labor Day, after three weeks of simmering resentment, local whites acted. When the swimmers arrived, they were greeted with what one remembered as “the usual profanity and jeering” from about two hundred onlookers. Then the crowd grew—an hour later it numbered a thousand. Charles Luthardt and thirteen members of his racist Fighting American Nationalists picketed. Angry locals circled the pool and shouted and cheered white swimmers who tore into a black effigy. The police made eight arrests and had to escort the black swimmers away from the scene. “I had looked in the face of an angry, ugly, hate-maddened mob,” recalled one in attendance.⁵ Two days later, members of the NAACP youth council returned to Riverside Park, provoking more limited skirmishes that resulted in seven additional arrests.⁶

A year later the NAACP touched off some less violent turf wars when it pushed for changes in Baltimore’s beleaguered school system. By the early 1960s many Baltimore schools, voluntarily desegregated in 1954, had been effectively resegregated by ongoing neighborhood transition. In 1958, just over half of Baltimore’s public schools were segregated, and white reliance on parochial and private schools ensured that crowding remained much more a problem for black schools than white ones.⁷

In September 1963 liberal school board members, under pressure from the NAACP, implemented a plan to remedy de facto segregation requiring the busing of students.⁸ When classes began, parents at affected schools rallied. In most white neighborhoods where black students were bused in for the first time, parents stood by curiously. But in Hamilton, one hundred white parents organized in protest. The leader of the protesting parents, an accountant, said that “we believe integration should not be forced on us by the whim of Negro pressure groups.⁹ Just inside the city limits in Northwest Baltimore, Hamilton was home to many former Southeast Baltimoreans. Between 1940 and 1960 the area had become increasingly ethnic as Germans, Italians, and Poles fled “out the road,” but Hamilton residents were better educated than blue-collar urbanites and they were predominantly clerical workers. These urban suburbanites claimed that they did not want their “clean, law-abiding, tax-paying residential section” turned into a “battlefield” by “ambitious Negro politicians” and other subversives.¹⁰

Back in Highlandtown, two hundred angry parents confronted school board representatives. Some voiced their resentments in traditional racial exclusionist terms. Said one parent: “A lot of people don’t want the colored here. They don’t belong here.” Others displayed more anger with white liberals than with blacks. “That’s all I hear is School Board, School Board, School Board. Who is the School Board?” asked one woman. “You’ll never get to see them,” replied another.¹¹

At Riverside Pool and in the 1963 school desegregation protests, white Baltimoreans still acted locally to protect local institutions. Nevertheless, in the latter instance especially, the focus of their anger was broadening, and even whites in outlying areas of the city were beginning to become as concerned with racial change as those in the older neighborhoods.

Working whites developed a distaste for big government only when it seemed to undermine their security. When civil rights groups decried police brutality and secured badly needed reform legislation, blue-collar Baltimoreans saw only lax law enforcement—just another example of skewed government priorities. By the early 1960s blue-collar Baltimoreans had become increasingly uneasy about crime. Many believed that the problem was unprecedented and wrote of “a present upsurge” or “current crime dilemma. ¹⁵ The East Baltimore Guide watched crime rates rise along with a perception that police officers were increasingly reluctant to use force. The paper blamed “lawmakers” who “put the rights of the criminal above the rights of the law abiding citizen.¹⁶ When a few blacks arrested at Riverside Park in 1962 leveled brutality charges against the police, the South Baltimore Enterprise countered by questioning politicians and “philosophers” who sought to protect “barbarians” at the expense of society.¹⁷

On Labor Day 1962, as whites lashed out in South Baltimore, the Baltimore chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality picketed “All-Nations Day” at the all-white Gwynn Oak Amusement Park for the ninth year in a row. Gwynn Oak lay just over the city line from West Baltimore neighborhoods that were changing from white to black in the early 1960s, and integrating the park had been CORE’s chief goal since the previous decade.¹⁸

The Baltimore chapter of CORE had been founded by a white Johns Hopkins psychologist in 1953.¹⁹ By the early 1960s the chapter was in decline and so predominantly white that, in the words of one member, “we had to integrate the picket line.²⁰ In 1963 the National Commission on Religion and Race, an interfaith group of clergy and lay activists, joined the Baltimore CORE in a Fourth of July protest at the park.²¹ Among the 283 overwhelmingly white participants from New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore were nationally prominent clerics representing the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faiths. These included Eugene Carson Blake, the highest official of the United Presbyterian Church, Bishop Daniel Corrigan of the National Council of the Episcopal Church, and Rabbi Morris Lieberman of Baltimore. Among the nine Catholic priests present was Monsignor Austin J. Healy of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore.²²

The park’s proprietors, encouraged by angry white onlookers and Luthardt’s counterpicketing Fighting American Nationalists, refused admission to the integrated group. When the protesters attempted to enter anyway, 275 were arrested and charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct.²³ Working whites wrote the Baltimore Sun in protest, and “crusading priests and ministers” who went “beyond their own bailiwicks to tell other people how to live” joined lawmakers and philosophers in the pantheon of outsiders disrupting working-class life.²⁴ Spiro Agnew, then Baltimore County executive, said that the protesters had “lost sight of their responsibilities.²⁵

Gwynn Oak had been a problem for the Catholic Church before. In 1962 the Knights of Columbus insisted on holding their Labor Day outing at the park despite protests by civil rights groups. In response, Archbishop Lawrence Shehan barred parochial schools in the diocese from using Gwynn Oak.²⁶ Now, with Baltimore Catholic clergy taking part in direct action protest for the first time, blue-collar whites were furious.²⁷ “Open defiance of the law,” one Catholic wrote regarding the nine Baltimore priests, “cannot be condoned, no matter who the violators are.” Another Catholic woman decided that she and her family did “not need any rabble-rousing priests anymore.” The priests involved received letters from their parishioners that were, in the words of a correspondent to the Jesuit journal America, “universally abusive and hostile.²⁸

By 1963 the Catholic Church was deeply divided.²⁹ Its parishioners continued to value the racial exclusivity enforced by parish boundaries, but church leadership was increasingly liberal, pro-integrationist, and intent on obliterating those boundaries. “The state of confusion among Catholics is now thoroughly out in the open,” wrote America’s Baltimore correspondent. “Catholic life here can never be quite the same again.³⁰ But there was more to the controversy than a desire to preserve the white parish.

A fundamental principle of American religious life had long been that the best way to change society was to reform the soul of the individual. But dogged white resistance to civil rights had convinced liberal religious leaders to seek social change first and worry about souls later. This decision, more than anything else, cut a deep divide between the progressive and the orthodox within religious groups that persists to this day. As Robert Wuthnow has pointed out, the controversy over Gwynn Oak was “as much over proper methods of engaging the public conscience as it was over racial equality.³¹ Some common ground did remain: church leadership and laity alike were united on the issue of school prayer, which moved from the Baltimore school system to the national spotlight in the early 1960s.

In October 1960 North Baltimore resident Madalyn Murray kept her son home from school. An avowed atheist, she charged that by sanctioning school prayer the Baltimore City School Board had violated her son’s constitutional rights.³² No politician, professor, or activist minister galled blue-collar Baltimoreans more than Murray, who smugly asserted that “row houses breed row minds.³³ Her case, bundled with others, made it to the Supreme Court as Abington School District v. Schempp, and on 17 June 1963 the Court ruled that school-sanctioned prayer violated the U.S. Constitution. ³⁴

At a time when nearly 70 percent of Americans belonged to a church or synagogue, the decision struck working-class Americans like a bolt from the blue. Only nine years earlier President Dwight Eisenhower had signed legislation adding “one nation under God” to the pledge of allegiance, declaring that “our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith.³⁵ Baltimoreans felt that their own religious freedom had been abrogated by an undemocratic Supreme Court. The wife of a Martin Company crane operator claimed to treasure America’s “strong spiritual base.” “After 200 years,” she said, “the Supreme Court apparently feels the right not to worship is more important.³⁶ A Middle River mechanic wrote, “Where are our rights as Americans if we can’t even vote for an issue as important as this one?³⁷ A local U.S. congressman pledged early hearings on the decision that Archbishop Shehan called a “regrettable step” by the Court.³⁸

On 29 April 1964, at the congressional hearings on school prayer, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, then the country’s most influential Catholic, shared the limelight with George Wallace, the nation’s most influential segregationist. Alabama’s governor had just won 34 percent of the vote in Wisconsin’s Democratic presidential primary and would soon be campaigning in Mary-land. ³⁹

In September 1963 Wallace attended a conference on urban problems in Baltimore.⁴¹ Afterward he publicly considered entering Maryland’s 1964 Democratic presidential primary despite the opposition of the state leaders. “No respectable politician will identify with the Southern Governor’s candidacy,” warned the state attorney general.⁴² In March 1964 Wallace filed, and the “respectable politicians” responded on cue. Lyndon Johnson needed a “favorite son” candidate to keep the Democratic vote from Wallace, and since Governor Millard Tawes had recently backed an unpopular tax boost, Senator Daniel Brewster agreed to do the job. But state Democrats waited to file. “We don’t want to dignify Wallace by answering him right away,” they condescended.⁴³

Condescension quickly deteriorated into bitter invective. On 20 March the Archdiocese of Baltimore dubbed Wallace a “law-defying racist” and held him personally responsible for the recent bombing deaths at the black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The Catholic Review said that no “patriotic American, much less an informed, conscientious Catholic,” could back Wallace.⁴⁴ An Episcopal bishop compared Wallace followers to Nazis.⁴⁵ As they had in 1954, the political establishment, the media, and the “best elements” of the city strove to marginalize the voices of working-class whites. But in the wake of the Supreme Court’s continued activism, blue-collar workers saw a larger threat than they had ten years earlier: a seemingly omnipotent federal government. A Baltimore County electrician’s wife urged people to “keep themselves informed of what is actually happening to our democratic way . . . before Wallace . . . is put out of circulation. ⁴⁶

The Sun portrayed the southerner’s campaign as an unwarranted intrusion, something “alien to the historic spirit of Maryland.” The South Baltimore Enterprise countered that the spirit in question bore a “stronger resemblance to Governor Wallace than to Senator Brewster. That is, unless all history stopped on May 17, 1954 and then was written anew.” The paper situated itself and its working-class readership in a Democratic tradition rooted in the segregationist South rather than in the New Deal. But instead of harkening back to the Lost Cause and dwelling on race, the Enterprise used rhetoric that would resonate through the politics of the next thirty years: “If you want the Federal Government to tell you how to live, vote for Brewster. If you want to tell yourself and your children how to live, vote for Wallace.⁴⁷

On May fifth Wallace won 30 percent of the vote in the Indiana primary. Three days later he kicked off his Maryland campaign. In ten personal appearances, he hammered home a few basic points as he delivered variants of one speech.⁴⁸ Wallace scrupulously kept race baiting out of his speeches, but the issue was never far from the surface. He still struck states’ rights chords, declaring that “the people of Maryland can run their state” better than Washington can, but Wallace drew from deeper rhetorical reserves than the tired tirades of the Old South.⁴⁹ In populist tones he condemned the burgeoning liberal establishment and counterposed the many across America to the few in Washington. The president and the Supreme Court, he charged, had high-handedly overridden “elected representatives who reflect the decisions of the people.” Although he condemned the excesses of the executive and judicial branches, Wallace astutely retained those shreds of the New Deal fabric that still served. He professed his wholehearted support of the industrial labor unions that owed their existence to New Deal activism.⁵⁰ Wallace was not antigovernment. Instead, as Michael Kazin has observed, “he explicitly favored a government that aided the common folk—as long as it stayed out of their schools, their unions, and their family lives.⁵¹

Most important, Wallace seemed to accord white working people the dignity and respect that other Democratic leaders had withdrawn. “People have the wisdom, the sense of justice and the decency to govern their own local affairs,” he said. They alone know best how to “raise their families and develop their children.” He affirmed that his supporters were the true custodians of traditional American values and institutions. “We have a duty,” he asserted, to “exercise the heritage bequeathed to us by those who stood firm against adversity, fought their way across this country, and established a strong, virile United States.” As Jody Carlson succinctly put it, Wallace made “no appeals to marginal men.⁵²

Wallace’s refusal to make personal attacks contrasted sharply with his opponents’ ridicule of the candidate and his supporters. Baltimore Evening Sun columnist Bradford Jacobs took up the invective, sharpened it with disdain for things southern, and hurled it at the governor’s Maryland defenders. The “Wallace claque” he wrote, “whoop and holler and stamp on the floor at the sight of him. . . . They squeal with redneck delight whenever, in his kindly way, he slips the liberals the knife.⁵³ The religion of the South was a ready metaphor for those who ridiculed Wallace’s “states’ rights evangelism.⁵⁴

The Sun distanced Maryland from the Deep South, labeling Wallace a “trespasser” intruding into “one of the great moral issues of our time, without possessing the depth of character to recognize that it is a moral issue.⁵⁵ Working-class Baltimore reversed the “morality” argument, finding Wallace’s detractors disingenuous. The Enterprise pronounced the Sun’s charge “a cheap instrument of guilt psychology” wielded by a “local establishment whose morality is a pocket book morality.” South Baltimore, the paper countered, had seen its share of real trespassers, “armed with every engine of civil disobedience.” But to Wallace’s enemies, the paper concluded, “way out there in their private swimming pools and clubs, segregated by sheer wealth, it won’t mean much.⁵⁶

Vincent Tallarico, a tire salesman, described a new chilling political atmosphere consonant with the Murray decision and condemned those who used patriotism to stigmatize Wallace supporters: “I am concerned when the name of Governor George Wallace is mentioned and the reply is ‘I’m voting for him, but please don’t quote me’. . . . I am concerned that one woman can change the beliefs of our American way of life in proclaiming that there is no Supreme Being. . . . I have experienced something like many of you, which I thought never existed in America. The Americanism method of instilling ‘FEAR’ in the minds of the American voter.⁵⁷

As election day approached, fear began creeping into the minds of state Democratic leaders. Wallace, it appeared, just might win. The Sun acknowledged that his “opponents, having underrated his sophistication, are outflanked and left to seem alarmists.” Instead, the southerner appeared the more “reasonable man.⁵⁸

The state AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education did everything it could for Brewster but had to fight leaders and rank and filers who defiantly backed Wallace.⁵⁹ Among them was John Devlin, a Bethlehem Steel employee and a member of United Steelworkers Local 2610. Speaking as head of a coalition of political clubs in East Baltimore’s First Legislative District, home to thousands of steelworkers, Devlin praised Wallace’s “fight against Federal interference” in state concerns.⁶⁰ In early May United Steelworkers president David McDonald, dismayed by the Wallace vote in Indiana steel towns, wired his Baltimore district director to “make every possible effort” for Brewster.⁶¹ Brewster needed the help. His foray into Baltimore’s steel country produced, even by the Sun’s estimate, a “skimpy” crowd. Wallace, on the other hand, asked packed rallies of blue-collar workers to consider that if federal officials began telling corporations who to employ, “what does that do for your seniority rights? It destroys them.” Wallace understood that working whites had few prerogatives on the job—with the as-yet undisputed exception of seniority rights.⁶²

Maryland Democrats finally sent for McDonald himself. The night before the election, McDonald, Governor Tawes, and Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy stumped East and South Baltimore in street-corner rallies fueled by abundant free beer.⁶³ But the problem was finding people to drink it. At one East Baltimore Polish American club, Brewster encountered only a handful of sullen officers and several unopened kegs.⁶⁴ Across the harbor and over the city line, Wallace closed his campaign at the Glen Burnie armory. Only half of the three thousand people who showed up could get in to see him, he was interrupted over sixty times by applause, and he left the stage to cries of “we love you George.⁶⁵

The next morning, according to a local editor, blue-collar workers in Glen Burnie “went to the polls with big grins on their faces and voted with relish.⁶⁶ It is unlikely that many South and East Baltimore union members woke up that day with hangovers from Brewster beer. If they did, once in the voting booth they were sufficiently alert to pull the lever for Wallace. In his best showing yet, the governor took 43 percent of the Maryland vote as the pattern evident in the 1954 governor’s race reappeared. Brewster carried the city only because of the black community’s impressive voter mobilization. At 50 percent it was more than double the usual figure.⁶⁷

Although not as united in favor of Wallace as blacks were in opposition, white support was broad. Middle-class conservatives in Baltimore County and on the Eastern Shore backed Wallace. In middle-class Hamilton, where a year before parents had protested school desegregation, the southerner got 55 percent of the vote. But his strongest backers were blue collarites.⁶⁸ In East and South Baltimore blue-collar wards 1, 23, and 24 combined, Wallace got 64 percent of the vote. In South Baltimore, the margins for Wallace ran in the high 60 percent range. In the Second Precinct of Ward 21, where the 1954 school desegregation protests had begun, Wallace got 71 percent of the vote. In Ward 24’s Fourth Precinct—the site of Southern High School—Wallace took 67 percent. On average, the margins in East Baltimore ran in the low sixties. Farther east, in predominantly ethnic and more heavily unionized Highlandtown, they only reached the high fifties.⁶⁹

“Never in the history of the state did colored voters deal more summarily with a candidate popular in other areas,” boasted the Baltimore Afro-American ’s political analyst.⁷⁰ He missed a more foreboding implication, though: never had Maryland’s electorate fractured so cleanly along racial lines. Martin Luther King was more circumspect. The Maryland returns, he observed, proved to white America that “segregation is a national and not a sectional problem.⁷¹

Like King, Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter believes that Wallace’s appeal was shaped primarily by racial fears. This “alchemist of the new social conservatism” tapped the reservoir of race, admixing only so much anticommunism, cultural nostalgia, and right-wing economics as necessary for effect.⁷² Thomas and Mary Edsall similarly see “race-coded strategies” as accounting for Wallace’s—and later Richard Nixon’s—white working-class appeal.⁷³

But these readings give Wallace too much credit and underestimate the power of his message. Wallace did not singlehandedly transform the dross of segregation into populist political gold: his supporters shaped his message as much as he gave voice to their resentments. More important, hidden race resentment is a weak reed on which to support so formidable a phenomenon as the new social conservatism. The three presidential campaigns of George Wallace were sustained by more than twenty years of white working-class experience. Some of those experiences did revolve around race, but increasingly they did not. It is suggestive to note that Wallace began as a southern populist and became a champion of segregation out of political expediency. It was the same for blue-collar urbanites who cut their political teeth during the days of the New Deal, the last time that they could remember when powerful politicians championed working people. The power of the new social conservatism, then, came not from the alchemist’s wizardry but from the long-term vitality of the populist impulse in American history. It also benefited, and still does today, from the fact that liberals—civil rights leaders and historians among them—have so consistently underestimated it.

The population of the city changed from 35 percent to 42 percent black in the early 1960s as areas of black settlement kept expanding.⁷⁴ By the end of 1966, nearly all of the twenty thousand whites who had lived in the Edmondson Avenue area in 1955 were gone. Most had heeded the invitations of suburban friends to “come on out here with the white people.⁷⁵ Two years later some areas along the city’s western boundaries were 50 to 75 percent black.⁷⁶

In the early 1960s, blacks who lived in Baltimore’s eastern ghetto began moving to the north and east; although the white neighborhoods in the south and southeast were little affected, residents grew concerned.⁷⁷ In ethnic Southeast Baltimore, the idea of open housing defied logic and long-standing tradition. Many residents, said one man, were determined to “sell to whoever they want” since “most of their houses came from their parents and friends of their parents.” In the early to mid-1960s, as neighborhood turnover intensified to the north, residents of Highlandtown put “we won’t sell” signs in their windows.⁷⁸ Under pressure from without, working whites drew more closely together than ever before. In Canton, when word got out that a black family had moved into an apartment nearby, Polish, Italian, and Irish residents confronted the landlord together.⁷⁹

By mid-decade, fair housing legislation had become the most divisive issue in local politics, but blue-collar Baltimoreans felt that they were faithfully defended by their city councilmen. In 1963 and again in 1965 a black councilman had introduced open housing legislation. Both times the initiatives were defeated. Then city council president Thomas D’Alesandro III (the son of the former mayor) introduced another open housing bill.⁸⁰ By early 1966 the fate of this bill was also in doubt, so Cardinal (formerly Archbishop) Lawrence Shehan made an unprecedented appearance before the city council. At a heavily attended hearing held at the War Memorial building, Shehan asked the council to bow to the “moral argument” implicit in the issue. About a third of the two thousand people in attendance booed the cardinal. They gave a warmer reception to a fundamentalist minister, a self-proclaimed “humble parish pastor,” who called the issue a matter of “individual freedom.” A woman from the small but vocal Baltimore Catholic Anti-Communist League accused Shehan of trying to lead a “double career as priest and politician.⁸¹

If ethnic and religious divisions were being bridged in common cause, labor’s solidarity was badly weakened. Catholic UAW official Albert Mattes called the treatment given to Shehan a “horrible disgrace.⁸² In this instance, as in others, there was a great deal of distance between union leadership and the rank and file. Less than two years earlier, a UAW member who had won a Baltimore County Council seat with union support, vetoed a public accommodations bill to the consternation of the Baltimore AFL-CIO.⁸³ When it came to social legislation, Baltimore’s city council members, much more than labor leaders, acted as guardians of white working-class interests. Throughout the 1960s city council members representing the First and Sixth Districts could be counted on to vote against civil rights and antipoverty initiatives.⁸⁴ In rare cases when they did not, their constituents quickly brought them back into line.⁸⁵ In 1966 these council members behaved predictably, defeating the housing bill by a 13 to 8 vote.⁸⁶

Reverend Joseph Connolly, one of those who had been arrested at Gwynn Oak, publicly noted that of the thirteen Catholics on the city council, only one voted for the bill. He laid the blame squarely on “neighborhood priests whose white parishioners still harbor racism.⁸⁷ One Baltimorean disagreed, claiming that Cardinal Shehan was booed “not by segregationists but by citizens.⁸⁸ Surely race was involved, but by rejecting all other arguments against open housing, the liberal clergy further discredited itself in the eyes of working-class Baltimoreans who were convinced that experience was a better guide than the dictates of activist ministers.

CORE had much to thank the liberal clergy for; the successful integration of Gwynn Oak Park in 1963 had revitalized the Baltimore chapter. Three years later the CORE national office began planning a pilot project to mobilize the poor and create a black political power base in an important city. One staffer sent the national office an assessment of conditions in Baltimore. He found Baltimore promising, citing the city’s weak police department, the three-time defeat of open occupancy, the Gwynn Oak achievement, the predictable opposition of Luthardt’s Fighting American Nationalists, and the fact that George Wallace had “used Maryland as his proving ground outside the South.⁸⁹

CORE’s national office decided to use Maryland as a proving ground as well. On 14 April the congress announced that Baltimore would be its “Target City” for 1966.⁹⁰ Although Target City director Lincoln Lynch asserted that any violence that occurred would be at the instigation of whites, CORE was not above doing some verbal instigating of its own. Lynch declared the operation “a war” and said that CORE “did not propose to make public [its] battle plans before the proper time.⁹¹

Baltimoreans were stunned. “What are people to do?” one woman wrote Mayor Theodore McKeldin. “When I say people I mean decent citizens (colored and white) that go to work every day. . . . It is bad enough the way things are now in Baltimore . . . now we can look forward to riots, picketing, and the possibility of everything we have worked for being destroyed. ⁹² A Hampden man, suspecting that the group “could be Communist inspired,” asked the mayor to simply prohibit CORE from coming to Baltimore.⁹³ Locals’ suspicion of outsiders was in part justified. The Baltimore chapter of CORE split over the Target City project. Baltimore members wanted to continue an existing open housing campaign rather than focus on “street people.” Consequently, CORE had to rely heavily on volunteers from outside Baltimore to conduct their Target City campaign.⁹⁴

The local campaign did gain CORE some quick favorable publicity. Its picketing of an all-white luxury apartment complex downtown had attracted counterpickets from the tiny Maryland Ku Klux Klan, led by Vernon Naimaster. Naimaster was a former bus driver from Essex, a working-class suburb where many Martin and Bethlehem Steel employees lived. Naimaster was the kind of white racist whom CORE leaders appreciated. His opposition, they believed, could only gain them more sympathy. By 1 May the confrontations had escalated, with Klan marchers appearing in full regalia and for the first time joined by Luthardt’s Fighting American Nationalists .⁹⁵

Throughout May CORE stayed in the headlines with its apartment house protests, but it never got a confrontation on the scale that it desired.⁹⁶ Mayor McKeldin skillfully undercut it by setting up task forces to study urban problems. General George Gelston of the Maryland National Guard, who had handled major racial disturbances in the Eastern Shore city of Cambridge before being made police commissioner, was equally adept at defusing controversy before it turned to confrontation.⁹⁷ But what CORE did achieve was disturbing enough to working-class whites.

Curiously, in the black inner city a few white working-class bars still thrived. These taverns catered to white factory workers during the day and to displaced white residents returning to the old neighborhood in the evening. Many had been under the same proprietorship for years. The bars, said one CORE veteran, “had become white islands.” Whites could sit down and be served, but blacks could only get carryout in their own neighborhoods. CORE organizers hoped that by picketing the bars they could mobilize low-income blacks around the issue, and in at least one instance they were right. In late May a crowd of 2,500 to 3,000 blacks gathered around counter-picketing Klansmen at Ritter’s Bar. Two city policemen were hit by rocks hurled from the crowd as they escorted the Klansmen away.⁹⁸ The well-publicized police injuries elicited angry responses from even the city’s liberals. McKeldin said that in this instance CORE’s approach “doesn’t give a good impression.” Baltimore’s leading liberal attorney, who had once represented Madalyn Murray, publicly repudiated CORE after the incident.⁹⁹

In the spring and summer of 1966 Target City organizers held a series of street rallies in the Baltimore ghettoes. From CORE’s perspective, these rallies, which attracted crowds of fifty to four hundred, were effective because they were “obviously a continual threat to public order.” Through May and June CORE events regularly attracted a contingent of Klansmen, Luthardt’s Fighting American Nationalists, and, in lesser numbers, members of the Catholic Anti-Communist League. At one event CORE members teased Robert Robusto, the head of the Catholic league, for being the sole representative of his group. Robusto admitted that his organization did not have too many “strong hearted people.” Nevertheless, he claimed, “I’m as extreme as anybody else!¹⁰⁰

The most substantial white counterinitiative came from the Baltimore branch of the National States Rights Party. The NSRP was a virulently racist, anti-Semitic group led locally by a nineteen-year-old Joseph Carroll from suburban Lutherville. Richard Norton, another young local leader, was from Northeast Baltimore.¹⁰¹ Carroll and Norton thought that they had found a more receptive environment in Southeast Baltimore than in the suburbs. They operated their Vinland bookstore in a prominent Highlandtown storefront throughout the late 1960s and held their own series of rallies in Southeast Baltimore’s Patterson Park in the summer of 1966.¹⁰²

Carroll secured the proper permits and persuaded the NSRP’s Reverend Connie Lynch, a self-proclaimed inciter of race riots, to speak in Baltimore. On Wednesday, 25 July 1966, Lynch appeared on a stage adorned with the symbol of the NSRP, a Confederate flag with a Nazi SS lightning bolt superimposed on it. Wearing a string tie and a vest tailored from a Confederate flag, Lynch denounced CORE, communists, Jews, the NAACP, the Supreme Court, President Johnson, and the FBI. He castigated gun-control legislation and proclaimed his dedication to the preservation of the “pure races.¹⁰³

About five hundred people, mostly teenagers, attended the first rally. Even CORE described the youth in attendance as “more curious than anything else.¹⁰⁴ More such “white man’s rallies” were scheduled through the weekend, and despite the inflammatory rhetoric from the rostrum and condemnations by Mayor McKeldin, city officials claimed that they had no choice but to let the rallies continue so long as they remained peaceful. On Thursday night, Lynch greeted a crowd of eight hundred “in the name of Jesus Christ” and announced his intention to defend “God, the white race, and constitutional government.¹⁰⁵

On Friday evening the crowd swelled to one thousand, and Lynch got what he was after. Some who had gathered, chanting “kill the niggers,” broke away from the rally, assaulted a white left-wing radical who had been heckling from the edge of the throng, and made a series of forays into the ghetto area north of the park, attacking a black man who was quickly rescued by police.¹⁰⁶ That night, a twenty-minute battle broke out in a black East Baltimore neighborhood as black and white youths assaulted each other with bottles, rocks, and metal pipes.¹⁰⁷

On Saturday, Carroll, Lynch, and Norton were arrested, and NSRP was barred from holding the rally scheduled for South Baltimore’s Riverside Park that evening. Although the possibility of violence was, according to the Sun, “the sole topic of conversation” in South Baltimore, evening brought only Robert Robusto passing out NSRP leaflets and denouncing the Catholic priests who had been walking the neighborhoods all day trying to calm the locals. “Those people have created the situation,” Robusto said, by preaching “all this racial justice and live with your brother stuff.¹⁰⁸

Neither Robusto nor Connie Lynch spoke for more than a tiny group of white working-class Baltimoreans. That afternoon in South Baltimore, locals may have been talking about the rallies, but they carried on as usual. One barber, more interested in baseball scores than race riots, rebuffed an inquiring Sun reporter, saying: “I don’t know about you. Myself I want to live.” An American Legion carnival, bingo tournaments, and baseball games all went on as usual.¹⁰⁹ A Highlandtown man who remembered the NSRP rallies well felt that in general people “just sort of ignored them.” He had never known anyone to enter the NSRP’s Vinland bookstore.¹¹⁰

Blue-collar Baltimore did learn a lesson from the NSRP rallies, but it was substantially different from that drawn by the mainstream press and politicians. C. D. Crowley, the editor of the East Baltimore Guide, reported on the large number of calls and letters his paper had received. Most locals had been offended by the language used and annoyed by the volume of the public address system, he noted. Some also “decried the entire idea of stark racism.” The people of East Baltimore had no taste for the ugly extremism displayed at the rallies, and most went on with their daily activities. The larger lesson to be drawn, wrote Crowley, was that “respect for the law has reached a new low.” But how could young people like those at the NSRP rallies be taught to respect the law, he asked, “when they see instance after instance of group leaders, including clergymen, breaking the law with impunity?” “Why should they worry about the law when they read that big shots have announced that they have no obligation to obey a law that didn’t agree with their way of thinking?¹¹¹

Crowley’s synopsis of white working-class grievances is notable for its lack of race talk. The efforts of “big shots”—lawmakers, philosophers, clergymen, and CORE—coupled with increasing crime and urban disorder were having an important effect. Whites were beginning to see issues of black and white as secondary symptoms, not primary causes. They could not agree with the “stark racism” displayed at Patterson Park—instead, the rhetoric of race was being displaced by the rhetoric of law and order. That the former was giving way to the latter for concrete reasons indicates that the popular appeals to “law and order” that saturated urban American politics by the late 1960s were not merely racism in disguise—they were qualitatively different. The 1966 gubernatorial election, between Democratic candidate George Mahoney and rising Baltimore County executive Spiro Agnew, marked an important transition point. Mahoney’s campaign bridged the gap between the starker racism of George Wallace and the law-and-order platform espoused by a later incarnation of Spiro Agnew.

In 1966 Mahoney thought that he had finally figured it out. “All you need is one good face off between those State’s Righters and CORE,” one Maryland political observer wrote in 1966, “and watch what happens on election day.¹¹⁴ Mahoney was willing to find out. In so doing he picked up the very expression that had helped keep black Southwest Baltimore homesteader Carnell Simmons out of jail almost twenty years earlier. “One of the basic precepts of our Founding Fathers was that a man’s home is his castle,” he announced in a speech that became the basis for his entire campaign.¹¹⁵ To Mahoney’s strongest supporters, the issue was as much the working-class community as the home. At a mid-August firemen’s carnival parade held in the working-class suburb of Landsdowne, a spectator called out after Mahoney: “That guy is the only man that can save this neighborhood. ¹¹⁶

One of Mahoney’s primary challengers was Carleton Sickles, who ran with the blessing of the liberal wing of the Maryland Democratic Party headed by Senator Joseph Tydings, the stepson of Millard Tydings. Among the other primary entrants was Thomas Finan, who represented the pro-business, conservative wing of the party.¹¹⁷ Mahoney stepped in with a campaign built around the phrase, “Your home is your castle, protect it!” and polarized the party, forcing all the other candidates—Sickles excepted—to come out against open occupancy as well.

Mahoney’s popularity with working whites put the state AFL-CIO, which had been backing Sickles in the Maryland House of Delegates for years, in a bind. The Sun noted that trade unionists from East Baltimore and the industrial suburbs who could otherwise have been counted on to vote for Sickles found it “hard to accept the prospect of living in a racially mixed neighborhood. ¹¹⁸ The UAW’s Albert Mattes lobbied for Sickles in East Baltimore but to no avail. A Canton man resented Mattes’s insinuation that anyone who did not support open housing was a racist. “It seems in my opinion Mr. Mattes is one in reverse,” he wrote.¹¹⁹ Another East Baltimorean attacked the local UAW’s campaign, which endorsed the Sickles ticket and opposed “local political bosses.” Baltimoreans, he said, preferred “political bosses whom we can vote out of office at our discretion” over “labor bosses in Detroit who our votes cannot touch.¹²⁰

John Devlin, the steelworker who had organized for Wallace in 1964, ran for the Maryland House of Delegates in the primary, touting his credentials as a “Democrat, Veteran, and Union Member” and echoing the “a man’s home is his castle” theme.¹²¹ Even Edward Garmatz, the card-carrying union electrician and veteran congressman from Baltimore, felt the need to proclaim loudly and often (though only in white working-class districts) that he was against open housing.¹²²

It is doubtful that many East Baltimore union members were contrite when, after the primary, Jerry Wurf of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees complained to the Maryland AFL-CIO that “30 percent of the voters voted for bigotry.¹²³ In a field of eight candidates, that 30 percent was enough for a victory. In Baltimore City, despite a large and well-organized black voting bloc, Mahoney won by four thousand votes.¹²⁴ In East Baltimore’s Ward 1, Mahoney got 68 percent of the vote compared with the labor candidate’s 13 percent. “Members of organized labor have deserted their union in the field of political action,” lamented Mattes.¹²⁵ Although one UAW local announced that it would back a third-party candidate in the general election, the state AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education decided to put Republican Spiro Agnew at the top of its “workingman’s” ballots.¹²⁶ Baltimore’s AFL-CIO, in a ringing testament to its own political irrelevance, wrote off the city’s most heavily blue-collar districts. “We left them alone,” admitted the AFL-CIO chairman.¹²⁷

Mahoney’s win may have left the state Democratic Party in disarray, but in Baltimore’s white working-class wards the nomination was business as usual. Both important machines, the Hofferbert-D’Alesandro machine (named for the ex-mayor, still active in the group) in East Baltimore’s First District and the Hodges-Leone machine (which had recently supplanted the Della-Wyatt organization) in South Baltimore’s Sixth District had backed Mahoney in the primaries.¹²⁸

One of the dominant themes in white working-class discourse during this period was the importance of “democracy,” usually understood in its simplest form: the will of the majority rightfully trumps that of the minority. In Baltimore, blue-collar politics clearly displayed what David Halle has identified as “the point of view of an extreme democrat.¹²⁹ This perspective helped foster the emergence of blue-collar rights talk in the 1950s and 1960s. As early as October 1954, one Baltimore mother carried a sign that mixed the concept of rights with the ultimate expression of democracy—the vote. “We want our Rights,” her placard read, “We voted for the School Loan—Why This?¹³⁰ In the wake of the 1963 decision on school prayer a Dundalk woman asked Mayor McKeldin to stand up for “our children’s rights [and] our citizen’s rights.” “What rights do the schools have anymore? The federal government is definitely taking over,” she concluded. ¹³¹

Working whites accurately perceived that on the federal level, the executive branch and especially the judiciary branch were doing much of the governing. Congress rarely came in for working-class reproach during the postwar years, largely, it could be argued, because it left unpopular steps up to the other two branches of government. The effect of this was a growing suspicion among working-class citizens that democracy was slipping away. Baltimoreans put more faith in what one woman described as “the Supreme People” rather than in the Supreme Court.¹³² In 1966 a Highlandtown man complained that “open housing is not a democratic procedure but rather a dictatorial policy.¹³³ The city council’s resistance to civil rights legislation in Baltimore during the 1960s must have reassured working whites that in local politics at least, their voices were being heard.

During the general campaign, Mahoney stuck to his “castle” platform and denied that it had any racial implications. Spiro Agnew, he countered, with his “outright appeals to the negro population,” was the one practicing racism. By the end of the campaign, though, he had attached a law-and-order plank to his open housing platform. In Baltimore’s blue-collar areas, Mahoney voiced the general belief that the streets were becoming increasingly unsafe. In South Baltimore he promised to lift restraints on law enforcement officers. “Who do they think they are?” said Mahoney, referring to lawbreakers of indeterminate race. “They think they can go along and do anything they want.” His implication became clearer as he continued: the police are told to treat “certain people with kid gloves.” As governor he promised he would instruct policemen to “hit first, fire first.¹³⁴

Spiro Agnew had never been a civil rights proponent, and his own position on open housing legislation had been one of lukewarm acceptance at best. But in contrast to Mahoney he appeared moderate if not liberal on the issue and began to attract black support.¹³⁵ He cultivated it by charging Mahoney with complicity in white hate mongering: “Remember all those cars with Mahoney bumper stickers on them when the National States Rights Party nearly caused a riot in Patterson Park,” he said.¹³⁶

On 8 November 1966 Marylanders went to the polls in the largest turnout for a gubernatorial election ever. Mahoney, in the words of the Sun, was buried under “an avalanche of negro and suburban white collar votes.” But if middle-class whites in the suburbs disregarded Mahoney’s message, those closer in did not. Precincts in middle-class Hamilton went for Mahoney by 53 percent. The blue-collar vote was even more substantial, and in the city as a whole polarization between black and white Baltimore voters was at least as stark as in the 1964 primary. Despite the wishes of organized labor and the efforts of the local Catholic leadership (the Catholic Review published a devastating attack on Mahoney a week before the election), the same working-class whites who had voted by a 64 percent margin for George Wallace gave Mahoney 71 percent of the vote.¹³⁷

Agnew, whose highest aspiration only nine years earlier had been a seat on the Loch Raven Community Council, was governor-elect of Maryland. The 1966 governor’s race, however, had been incorrectly characterized as a conflict between racists and civil rights champions. After the election, one analyst warned that “it would be a great mistake to interpret the Agnew victory as a mandate for open housing.¹³⁸ Spiro Agnew would soon prove that he was no “liberal.”

The nation was engulfed by a crime wave of tidal proportions in the 1960s. During the first six years of the decade crime rose 60 percent while the population increased only 10 percent. From 1966 to 1971 crime shot up another 83 percent. By mid-decade, both crime rates and public apprehension had reached unprecedented levels. Explanations abound. Some cite the maturing of the baby boom generation to young adulthood—the prime age for lawbreaking. In Baltimore, as in other blue-collar cities, gradual deindustrialization no doubt contributed to impoverishment and helped drive up crime rates. But even so, the increase was entirely out of proportion to the city’s industrial decline. Another contributing factor locally was the boom in heroin use, mostly among inner-city blacks, beginning around 1965.¹⁴² In the 1950s shoplifting had been the preferred means of supporting a habit, but by the late 1960s it had given way to burglary and violent crime. In Baltimore City from 1965 to 1970, burglaries tripled and robberies quintupled.¹⁴³

For blue-collar whites as for others, an important reference point was the murder rate. In 1961 the Maryland murder rate was at its low point for the sixties at 4 percent below the national average. From 1961 to 1968 the national murder rate rose 45 percent while the Maryland rate shot up 106 percent.¹⁴⁴ In the summer of 1968 the newspapers announced that Baltimore’s murder rate was fifth highest among America’s major cities. In early 1969, on the basis of a new study, the Baltimore News-American (formerly the News-Post) proclaimed Baltimore to be “the number one crime city in the nation,” its murder rate second only to Houston.¹⁴⁵

To blue-collar Baltimoreans, the rising crime rates seemed explicitly linked to the failures of liberal government. An editorial in the East Baltimore Guide of 16 January 1968 observed that politicians “have yet to provide the man who is concerned with the safety of his family any evidence that they will protect him.” Therefore, “every citizen has good reason to worry and seek out do-it-yourself protection.” A month later, six out of seven letters to the editor of the East Baltimore Guide were on “the crime crisis.” One woman lamented that the “cry of citizens about crime is drowned out by the louder voices of our elected officials who cry ‘More Taxes!¹⁴⁶

In 1969 Life magazine featured a six-week study of the city conducted by the Harris Poll. “Baltimore,” Life announced, “is a city of silent terror.” Three-fourths of Baltimoreans had changed their daily lives out of fear of crime. Evening church services were a thing of the past, and sales of security devices and handguns had soared. “In the daily lives of many citizens,” the study found, “the fear of crime takes an even greater toll than crime itself.¹⁴⁷

To white Baltimoreans, this change seemed directly connected to the racial transformation of the city’s neighborhoods. By 1966 a woman in Northeast Baltimore had seen her white neighborhood give way to high-density black housing. She wrote McKeldin that “it is truly a shame to see this old, but well maintained, neighborhood going to slums in such a short period of time.¹⁴⁸ The same year another woman, “born and raised in North East Baltimore,” complained about the neighborhoods of recent black settlement north of Patterson Park, making the link explicit. “Until this equal rights came along, North East Baltimore was a clean, safe section to live in,” she said.¹⁴⁹

Working-class whites had long emphasized the responsibility of residents to their neighborhood, and this shaped their reaction to the prospect of urban decline. Blacks, many believed, simply did not put in the work necessary to keep up what were now their neighborhoods.¹⁵⁰ When McKeldin appeared on television touring an inner-city slum, one woman noticed that several “able bodied men” from the area were accompanying him. McKeldin, she wrote, should have insisted that “they must do something about conditions,” rather than talking about “what the City of Baltimore is going to do for them.” She saw a simple solution in “Brooms, Water Pails, and Cleaning rags used by them not everybody else.¹⁵¹

By 1967 Baltimoreans were sure that the government, which should encourage the use of soap and water and punish criminals, whether black or white, was going to do neither. Said one East Baltimore man: “The fault lies with the government, state and city authorities” who protect and condone criminals “at the expense of the good citizen.¹⁵² Throughout his political career Theodore McKeldin had shown a high degree of compassion for blacks, Jews, and female voters. “The minority groups—they elected me,” he once admitted.¹⁵³ But by 1967 it was clear that the mayor, who had been seen skipping rope with inner-city children while Detroit and Newark burned, could not win reelection: his attention to the black community had alienated too many Baltimore whites.¹⁵⁴ That fall Thomas D’Alesandro III took over the mayor’s office. When he kept up McKeldin’s attention to the black community, angry Democrats told him to “stop naming commissions.” One Highlandtown critic believed that the interests of average citizens were being ignored by “irresponsible officials,” including the new mayor.¹⁵⁵

It appeared that the responsiveness of government to working whites was inversely proportional to the tax burden.¹⁵⁶ Property taxes, long a sore spot for blue collarites, had been increasing steadily since 1958.¹⁵⁷ An April 1968 study found that city and state income taxes for Baltimore residents were, with minor exceptions, the highest among the country’s ten largest cities.¹⁵⁸ “Working people may as well go on relief,” despaired one woman.¹⁵⁹ More important, citizens felt that they were not getting what they paid for. “We are approaching a tyranny imposed by crime and high taxes—too little of which monies are used for the good of the honest working people who pay the bills here,” wrote one man.¹⁶⁰

To many, it seemed all too clear where the tax dollars—particularly at the federal level—were going. Baltimore’s welfare rolls exploded during the decade. In 1960, 5,218 families with nearly 18,000 children were on welfare. Ten years later there were 26,666 families with 77,000 children on the rolls—five times as many.¹⁶¹ The city had one of the nation’s first Community Action Programs, a Great Society antipoverty initiative supported by both federal and city funds. Baltimore’s Community Action Program spending started at $4 million in 1965 and peaked at $15 million in 1969.¹⁶² And when tax money for “Great Society projects” was not going to programs for the poor, observed the East Baltimore Guide, it was being spent to benefit the “so-called cream of society.¹⁶³

Despair at the Great Society’s failures and rising fear of crime took place before a backdrop of urban violence unprecedented in American history. The landmarks are familiar: Watts in 1965, Hough in Cleveland and 36 other major urban riots in 1966. By the end of Summer 1967 there had been another 164 urban riots, the worst in Newark and Detroit. Then on 4 April 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated. Up until then, Baltimore’s leaders had been proud that their city had escaped the spreading racial violence. Even after fires started in Washington, D.C., Mayor D’Alesandro, only a few months in office, hoped that his city would be spared. But on 6 April, late on a Saturday afternoon, a bottle thrown from a crowd of black teenagers on the northeast side of the downtown broke a window at the Fashion Hat Shop, and four days and nights of rioting began.¹⁶⁴

The 1968 riot confirmed many working whites’ worst fears and yet again underscored the importance of neighborhood self-sufficiency. It discredited a Democratic political leader and made a Republican a hero. By 11:00 that Saturday night, city officials declared the riot out of control and Governor Agnew ordered 5,500 National Guard troops into Baltimore. By Sunday night the rioting had spread to the west and the Guard was overwhelmed. Governor Agnew requested federal troops, and the Guard was put under federal command.¹⁶⁵ Agnew had given the Guard strict orders not to shoot looters, a move that did much to minimize casualties, but when word got back to Southeast Baltimore that National Guardsmen and police officers just “stood by” while rioters destroyed property, whites prepared to defend themselves. “As far as they were concerned,” recalled one resident, “law and order had to be maintained even if it had to be maintained by the individual.¹⁶⁶

As the riot progressed, whites in Southeast Baltimore set “definite lines” to be defended. In some instances people were seen gathering with guns and other weapons.¹⁶⁷ Residents of Little Italy, which was close to the rioting and near a black public housing project, felt particularly vulnerable. There, according to two witnesses, whites took to rooftops with weapons for a time.¹⁶⁸ George O’Connor’s landlord left a loaded shotgun in the hallway “in case the blacks decided to mount an assault on Highlandtown,” he recalled.¹⁶⁹ This tendency toward vigilantism grew naturally out of working whites’ belief in self-help and their loss of faith in civil authorities. In January 1969 the East Baltimore Guide tacitly acknowledged this when it lashed out at the Evening Sun for “covering up” violent crimes by burying accounts in the back pages: “Let us have no precipitous reaction. Let us avoid any thought of vigilante irresponsibility, the Evening Sun treatment seems to say.¹⁷⁰

Working whites made much of their leaders’ responses to the event. During the riots, D’Alesandro called on the city’s black leadership, both “moderate and militant” in the Sun’s words, to help maintain order.¹⁷¹ Agnew’s position against shooting looters was unpopular but quickly forgotten. What whites remembered was the stand he took in the aftermath of the riot that changed his life and national politics as well.

Agnew had been growing increasingly disturbed with “black power” since late 1967. That July, rioting broke out in Cambridge on Maryland’s Eastern shore after an incendiary speech was delivered by H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which, despite its name, had renounced nonviolence for radical black militancy and “black power.” When Agnew received a copy of Brown’s speech a few months later, he was shocked by the rhetoric; he was appalled when Brown’s inflammatory words did not have the same effect on Maryland’s moderate black leaders.¹⁷² In early 1968, when SNCC leaders set up a Baltimore office and called the city’s war on crime “a war on the black man,” black moderates condemned them. On 24 March, in an effort to heal this split, the moderates and the militants had a secret meeting. Agnew heard of it and began planning to rebuke civil rights leaders for their collusion with extremists. Although the riot intervened, Agnew stuck to his plan, making his statement far more potent than it otherwise would have been.¹⁷³

On 11 April, with 6 dead, 700 injured, 1,000 businesses destroyed, damage costs reaching $14 million, and ashes still smoldering, Agnew called a meeting with civil rights leaders, many of whom had just come off the streets in attempts to calm the black community. There, city and state officials sat before the black leaders—“like a white jury sitting in judgement on the slave folk,” recalled one man present—and Agnew delivered his rebuke. ¹⁷⁴

Agnew’s initial remarks seemed tailored for a third party not present—Baltimore’s white working-class community. “I did not request your presence to bid for peace with the public dollar,” he began. Then he called attention to the white men seated beside him. “Look around you and you may notice that everyone here is a leader—and that each leader present has worked his way to the top.”¹⁷⁵ As black leaders began walking out, Agnew blamed Baltimore’s black moderates for refusing to speak out against extremists and cast the riots as the inevitable result. By the time he was done, only half of the audience remained. The NAACP’s Juanita Jackson Mitchell spoke for them, blaming the city for making “burners and looters” of their children. Mayor D’Alesandro issued a public statement deploring Agnew’s comments. Liberals and blacks hated the speech, but working-class whites in Baltimore and across the country loved it.¹⁷⁶ The Baltimore Labor Herald went so far as to call it “one of the outstanding speeches of the century.¹⁷⁷

In 1967 working whites who fondly remembered the mayoralty of another Thomas D’Alesandro had elected his son by a record margin. But in the civil rights era, the younger D’Alesandro was forced to choose between black support and a blue-collar constituency.¹⁷⁸ Even before the riot, a growing number of working whites agreed with an East Baltimore seamstress who claimed, “along with so many other loyal Democrats,” to have “become disillusioned.” She accused D’Alesandro of “bending to the will of various negro factions” in a way that proved he was “not the D’Alesandro his father was.¹⁷⁹ After the riot he paled in comparison to Agnew, who had the courage to denounce what the wife of a Martin Company worker called “not just the white man’s racism but black man’s racism too.¹⁸⁰

The 1968 riot marks the point when most remaining vestiges of race talk passed out of the language of working-class discontent. Rising crime helped smother blatantly racist resentments, but equally important was the newfound ability of whites—in the wake of “black power”—to charge blacks with racism as well. Where whites had formerly pressed for exclusionary, race-based rights, now blacks seemed to be doing so. Blue collarites considered black power as illegitimate as Agnew did: the problem seemed to be that other powerful whites did not. Blue-collar discontent moved to a different level: “racism” explained little, “liberalism” explained much. A North Baltimore clerk, who had seen D’Alesandro and some spokesmen for the “white community” on television, complained to the mayor’s office that “moneyed men” from exclusive neighborhoods did not represent the “middle class,” whose “only right is to pay taxes” that provide “goodies for the loafers and goof-offs who loot and riot. Whose only philosophy is to get what you can without working.” In contrast, he said, Agnew “displayed a rare trait in public officials. He had the courage to say what had to be said.¹⁸¹

Another person who thought highly of Agnew’s speech was Patrick Buchanan, and he sent a copy to his boss Richard Nixon.¹⁸² Nixon had met Agnew a few months earlier and was impressed. “There can be a mystique about a man. You can look him in the eye and know he’s got it. This guy has got it,” Nixon later said. Prior to 11 April, Agnew’s prospects had not been bright. His term as county executive had been made possible only because of a split in the ranks of the Baltimore County Democratic Party. George Mahoney had rescued him from certain defeat for a second term by making him governor the same way. “If he would hold still for a minute,” said Maryland Democrat Paul Sarbanes, “we’d nail him.” Agnew might have been thinking along these lines on 11 April, when he told his critics: “Don’t you know I’m committing political suicide when I sit here and do this?¹⁸³

But Agnew’s luck held. In August Nixon decided that he thought enough of Agnew’s mystique to make him his running mate. In Agnew’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, a bit of the 1966 social liberal resurfaced when he called for an end to racial discrimination. But the new Agnew won out. “Anarchy, rioting, and even civil disobedience have no constructive purpose in a constitutional republic,” declared the candidate. ¹⁸⁴ As the 1968 presidential campaign began, Agnew assumed the role of Nixon’s blunt-spoken hatchet man and began working to carve votes away from George Wallace, who had complicated the race by entering as an independent. Agnew ran against one would-be Wallace in 1966. Two years later he had become one himself.

In Baltimore, those voters who had backed Wallace in 1964 and Mahoney in 1966 made a revealing choice. Although the third-party bid provided another opportunity to vote for the southerner, Wallace remained a protest candidate. Nixon, on the other hand, was electable. But there was another difference between the candidates. Wallace, no matter what he said, would forever be the “racist’s” candidate. Nixon and especially his running mate were expressing a more potent, and indeed more accurate, sentiment. “Law and order” easily encapsulated white-working peoples’ fears about the decline of their neighborhoods and their resentments against leaders who had turned their backs on blue-collar culture. The phrase “law and order” appealed not solely to an ephemeral and generalized resentment, but to a host of material grievances. Equally important, the words carried ample gravity of their own—they were much more than gauze for racist resentments too ugly to be voiced. By 1968, not only were blacks breaking laws with seeming impunity, but whites—college students and clergy—were as well. Indeed, the clergymen and women who troubled Baltimoreans most that year were practicing much more than nonviolent resistance.

On 17 May 1968, a beautiful Friday afternoon, three women were working at the local draft board upstairs in the Knights of Columbus building in Catonsville, just west of Baltimore. When the head clerk turned and recognized Baltimore priest Philip Berrigan, she thought, “Oh my Lord something is going to happen.¹⁸⁵ Berrigan, his brother Daniel, a professor at Cornell University, and seven other Catholic priests politely called the women “murderers,” filled two wastebaskets full of draft records, and burned them in the parking lot.¹⁸⁶ On 7 October, with the presidential campaign under way, the trial of the “Catonsville Nine” began in Baltimore. A Peace Action Committee, coordinating demonstrations in support of the Berrigans, sent out flyers inviting protesters to “Agnew Country.¹⁸⁷

On the morning of the seventh, 1,500 antiwar marchers filled the streets of Baltimore, challenged only by a handful of NSRP counterpickets who waved an American flag in front of the post office.¹⁸⁸ In North Baltimore, near Johns Hopkins University, two working-class women watched the paraders convene. They were less concerned with hippies’ cries of “smash the state” than with the nuns and priests who followed them singing (in what was an all-white parade) “We Shall Overcome.” “I suppose you’ll tell us how to live next Sunday from the pulpit,” one women called out. “They’ll meet their match tonight,” another remarked, for George Wallace was making a campaign appearance at the Baltimore Civic Center.¹⁸⁹

That night, Wallace, who had kicked off his drive into the northern states at Glen Burnie in June, exhorted a crowd of 7,500. His partisans, said the Sun in an account reminiscent of its 1964 story, “stomped, shouted, and shook fists” as their man berated hecklers. Wallace attacked the usual targets, including the breakdown of law and order, the Supreme Court, and the misuse of federal tax money.¹⁹⁰ But his greatest applause came when, in a now-familiar routine, the southerner told his hecklers—some black and some white—that he had “two four letter words you don’t know: S-O-A-P and W-O-R-K.” The crowd, said the Sun, “went wild.” For the Baltimoreans who supported Wallace, Garry Wills wrote, “work [was] the magic word.¹⁹¹

Strained by the Wallace and Agnew candidacies, the ties of party loyalty that had kept Baltimore’s working whites allied with the Democrats were weakening. By the fall of 1968, the national press was making much of blue-collar support for Wallace.¹⁹² The AFL-CIO fought Wallace hard, both on the national and state level. The state AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education distributed half a million anti-Wallace pamphlets, including one entitled “Do Maryland Workers Want Alabama Wages?¹⁹³ But the Labor Herald unapologetically championed Wallace. Nearly every issue’s political column started with observations like “if the election were held today Wallace would win.” One columnist claimed to speak for the “average guy” angered by “uneducated blacks” who were using federal money to tell people to “burn everything the Whitey owns” and filthy hippies who were burning draft cards—people who “get paid for not working.” As this labor spokesman saw it, these issues had an immediacy that the AFL-CIO’s economic arguments lacked.¹⁹⁴

In the East Baltimore Guide, the UAW’s Albert Mattes asked his fellow Democrats “to be loyal to their party this crucial year of 1968.” “It seems to me,” countered East Baltimore mechanic Ray Murawski, “that the Democratic party should have been loyal to the people during their term in office.” Murawski claimed that he had “no intention” of voting for Wallace but cautioned Baltimoreans not to be “swayed by false loyalty complexes.¹⁹⁵ C. D. Crowley, the paper’s editor, wrote that even though “there is virtue in being faithful to one’s party . . . I’m going to vote for Nixon.” As for labor’s argument that the Democrats made Social Security and Medicare possible, a “disillusioned Democrat” wrote that both would be “totally useless if we are murdered on the streets.” A Highlandtown man said simply, “Ted Agnew has stood up for us and we should stand up for him.¹⁹⁶

Some of the Southeast Baltimoreans who had gone “out the road” appear to have stood up for Agnew as well. In Hamilton, Nixon got 51 percent of the vote and the Nixon and Wallace totals combined hit 64 percent—there was not much left for the Democrats. But party loyalty was stronger among urban blue collarites. Wards 1, 23, and 24 combined gave the Democrats 53 percent of the vote, but only because some unionists appear to have heeded the call for party loyalty. In heavily unionized Southeast Baltimore, Hubert Humphrey garnered 54 percent of the vote, but in South Baltimore’s Wards 23 and 24, the Wallace and Nixon votes combined kept Humphrey’s share below 50 percent of the total.¹⁹⁷

By the 1960s New Deal liberalism was dead, succeeded by a rights-based liberalism that could no longer protect, or even sanction, the institutions and ideals of the urban white working class. Early in the decade, blue collarites staked their own rights-based claims, but they were “race-based” rather than “civil” rights. At the dawning of the Great Society, the national Democratic Party had no place for these claims, but from the South came a politics of populism that was much more accommodating. In 1964 a majority of Baltimore’s white working voters agreed with Pearl Lowery, a carpenter’s wife, who said, “if the State of Maryland does not have anyone who will stand up for the rights of whites as well as colored, then we can support someone who will, even though he is from Alabama.¹⁹⁹

In 1968 a new white working-class champion emerged closer to home. For John Ragin, a baker from Southwest Baltimore of second-generation Hungarian descent, it was the 11 April speech that sold him on Agnew. In 1970 Ragin claimed to be “mostly-Democrat.” But “I’ll switch if I like,” he said, and he had presidential hopes for Agnew: “If he keeps hitting the nail on the head the way he’s doing now, I think he’ll go someplace.” In 1964 George Wallace stood up for white rights. Six years later, as Ragin saw it, Spiro Agnew stood up for the “little man” against the “big money.²⁰⁰ In a space of six years working whites had begun to see and enunciate their problems differently. George Wallace was a master practitioner of southern politics. Spiro Agnew was from overwhelmingly white Baltimore County, not Alabama. He had little experience with the politics of race and needed none. His message was one of right versus wrong rather than black versus white, and it was to the former rather than the latter that white working-class voters responded in 1968.

Despite the travails of the 1960s, a slim majority of Baltimore’s working-class whites stuck with the party of labor in 1968. Still, blue collarites did not mind being from “Spiro Agnew Country.” A 1970 Gallup Poll found Agnew to be the third most admired man in America behind Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, but it took working people longer than it did Agnew to switch parties.²⁰¹ In July 1972 steelworkers and retirees in a Highlandtown bar told a reporter that Southeast Baltimore was “Spiro Agnew Country.” The journalist reminded them that Agnew had lost there in 1968. “Course he did,” one of the patrons replied without missing a beat, “he ain’t a Democrat! ²⁰²

In the last few months of 1969, nearly every news magazine reported on “troubled,” “forgotten,” or “middle” Americans. Whatever they were called, most anecdotes revolved around urban blue collarites. The networks ran shows championing small-town American values, but the one that took hold was All in the Family with the comforting message that there was little more than bluster beneath the seemingly menacing exterior of the “troubled American.” Although the term had been around since 1964, the sudden and spectacular reemergence of the “white backlash” stereotype late in the decade suggests that the grounds of the political debate had shifted.²⁰³ In the 1960s concerns that had existed for decades were now being fought out in the national political arena, and, more problematically, they were being argued in terms quite legitimate in American political discourse. By 1970 working-class discourse contained too many invocations of democracy and the rule of law, and too few appeals to white supremacy and violence. This made it difficult to dismiss blue-collar arguments as racist, but liberal intellectuals and politicians succeeded in doing so.

“White backlash” offered an easy way to understand these perplexing challenges to the liberal order by providing a caricature: “Joe Six-Pack,” insecure about his own social standing, was lashing out against the blacks, using thinly veiled code words to substitute for his true white supremacist leanings. And so, as the long arc of postwar liberalism peaked and plummeted sharply, dragged down by the destruction not only of its urban coalition, but also of the cities themselves, it was easy to pretend that no one had seen the trouble coming.