196
MICHAEL HARRINGTON
In Birmingham in 1963, Martin Luther King,
Jr.
did not simply
demand integration. He talked also of jobs, housing and education.
The problem was being defined, in short, not in terms of the sec–
tional prejudices of the South but in terms of the economic and
social premises of the country as a whole. That this was understood in
northern racial ghettos was evident in the job demonstrations of 1963;
and the March on Washington made full employment a civil rights
demand. All this pointed toward new tactics. A lunchroom can be
integrated by the direct action of students. Th!c'! multi-billion dollar
expenditures necessary to create jobs and to replace the black slums
with decent integrated housing are of a magnitude that requires
nothing less than a new American political majority. And this the
Negroes could not achieve on their own.
A second factor in the current change has been the establishment
of
de facto
coexistence between the United States and Russia. The
Cold War had obsessed America from 1947 on. A huge sector of
society was engaged in creating the means of destruction and a good
part of the labor movement enjoyed full employment and high wages,
and as a result was quite satisfied politically. In the name of national
defense, patriotic celebration took over from radical criticism, and
was no longer restricted to American Legionnaires. And since the
rhetoric of Communist totalitarianism was socialist, the climate was
favorable for a McCarthyite equation of social change and treason.
The transition to the present informal coexistence is too compli–
cated even to try to summarize. However, one aspect of it should
be noted: it was not a result of any activities of the workers or
of the civil rights movement. Peace sentiment never affected more than
a section of the liberal middle class and even there it was primarily
limited to the nuclear-testing issue. All is not yet sweetness and light,
of course. The superpowers still balance their terrors, the nuclear club
now has five members with the prospect of more, etc. And "escalation"
of the Vietnamese--or any other-crisis would not only end talk of the
War on Poverty, and of the Great Society, but threaten World War III.
These fearful "ifs" of war and peace, I want only to emphasize
here, do not, alas, depend upon the will of masses mobilized in a peace
movement. And it is in this international sphere that the Left of the
sixties
is
furthest from power-or influence.
Finally, the movement to the Left of recent years was marked by
