University of Virginia Library

Robert Gillmore

The GOP
And Social Justice

Kevin Phillips (along with
William S. White) would be for
Richard Nixon what Roscoe
Drummond was for Eisenhower,
Charles Bartlett for Kennedy, John
Roche for Johnson or, for that
matter, Peregrine Worst home for
Edward Heath: He would be the
Boswell of an Administration. And
in a column a month ago
distinguished only by its singular
callousness, Mr. Phillips displayed
the ambiguous but nevertheless
mean spirit in which the Nixon
administration would advance the
cause of racial justice.

Mr. Phillips, bless his frigid heart
(and frozen frown), lamented the
perfidy of HEW bureaucrats who
were defying the Administration's
civil rights policy by "forcing
integration" of suburbs by insisting
that suburbs allow low income
housing to qualify for water and
sewer grants.

Perverted Power

To read Mr. Phillips is to sense
not only that (1) he considers
"forced integration" a dastardly
perversion of federal power,
tantamount to say, the Presidential
prejudging of Charles Manson, but
(2) Mr. Phillips has no sense at all
of the multiple injustices of not
"forcing integration."

The issue, stated purely, is not
whether the government ought to
"force integration" but whether
public monies (created partially
from taxes paid by poor blacks and
poor whites) ought to pay for
benefits from which they are
effectively excluded. Elemental
fairness alone dictates that they
should not.

But the issue Mr. Phillips raises
is even larger, I think, than merely
integration.

It is the matter suggested by a
bitter statement made to me by an
old and radical college friend:
"There are subsidies for everyone in
this damn government," he said,
"except poor people." There are
federal aid programs, that is, for
small business, big business,
agriculture, home buyers, veterans
in schools, and all the rest —
subsidies from what John Morton
Blum calls a "middle class
government," mainly for middle
class people who start small
businesses, buy small homes, etc.,
but who, alas, are not poor.

Christian Concern

Happily, belatedly, and inspired
no doubt by the Christian concern
of Michael Harrington, the
Kennedy-Johnson Administrations
tried to remedy the matter with its
"wars" on poverty and hunger. And
the Nixon administration, to its
historic credit, is taking the largest
step of all to end poverty — its
guaranteed (if very minimum)
annual income.

It is these splendid efforts to
help those who need help most that
are so unlike Mr. Nixon's, Mr.
Phillips, and the suburbs' callous
disregard of people and problems
whose need is greater than theirs:
for I question not only awarding
water and sewer (or any other)
grants to suburbs without low
income housing but awarding such
grants at all. How dare the
Wellesleys and Scarsdales of
affluent America beg for $30,000
sewer grants when most of their
residents live in $30,000 homes —
when, also, residents in slums a few
miles away live in houses not one
tenth as comfortable?

I am reminded of another friend
(much less radical) who drove up
one day to show me his silly, shiny
new car and to announce that he
and the wife just couldn't stand to
live in Boston anymore and were
going to fly to the suburbs — to
escape, to run away from it all.

That of course is the suburban
mentality; and it is so wrong. If
there is still evil and sin in our
secular world, that surely must be a
cardinal one. And to care for those
whose faults are truly not their own
must rank as the greatest good
work.

This spirit was manifested so
well when the wealthy residents of
Boston's venerable Beacon Hill
joined with their impoverished
North side neighbors to declare the
entire area a poverty pocket so they
might qualify for Economic
Opportunity programs. The
residents acted as did their
ancestors in the best patrician and
Tory tradition: materialistically.

But Boston is a special and
splendid place. And at least for the
duration of the Nixon
administration, Beacon Hill and
places like it will be the exception,
not the rule.

Must Integrate

And so Mr. Phillips and his
Administration may win this round.
But in time the suburbs will
integrate because they can and
must. And they will if only because
where conscience may not prevail
the arm of law and government will
instead. The work of the terrible
swift sword is hardly finished.

And it is a pity that that sword
will not be wielded as it once was
by Republicans, Republicans like
Seward, Sumner, Thad Stevens and
the abolitionist Wendell Phillips,
who once lived on Beacon Hill.

For if the Republican party
would truly be the party of
individualism and opportunity (and
that it must) it would provide
enough — and for the poor even
unequal — legal, economic and
social opportunity to each
individual to reach the ends of his
individuality — to make, as it were,
every common man uncommon.