54
TOM HAYDEN
inequalities remain, but with more cushions and comforts for all.
This would mean some kind of new legitimacy,
a
La
the AFL-CIO,
for the colored minorities, the young people, the students and others
currently causing "disorders."
It
would be, for me, a regimented
society, with a still capitalist economy buttressed by a "state planning"
sector able better than now to create welfare and pacify conflicts.
It would develop the same program, with greater violence, for the
"malcontents" in the new countries. Since these tendencies already
exist in the U.S., on some days I feel hopelessly sure that the future
lies in this direction.
But then I have wondered: this country has mobilized its various
interest groups only around foreign wars. Could it mobilize as much
on domestic problems such as Civil Rights or Poverty? Or would
these issues, by their nature, create a resistance as much as a mobiliza–
tion, thus paralysing the country's effort to "modernize"? We know
that many top government officials and business leaders understand
the need for a crusade against racism and poverty, if only to preserve
the country's image and reduce disorder (Prudential Insurance people
were pushing for that "radical," Kenneth Clark, to come run the
Poverty program in Newark). But others at the top disagree, and
still others don't care because they do not feel the problem directly.
Then, too, the federal or pluralist system itself puts up countless
roadblocks against a mobilization directed from Washington.
Should the Great Society fail, the country might go towards
the other model: Los Angeles. Perhaps economic and racial divisions
are too deep to be healed by Lyndon even with all his allies. Perhaps
even the community organizers, even those in SNCC and SDS, are
too conservative for the angriest people in this country. Perhaps the
only forms of action appropriate to the angry people are violent.
Perhaps a small minority, by setting ablaze New York and Washing–
ton, could damage this country forever in the court of world public
opinion. Sure, American history is amazingly stable, but we always
have been a violent people and once before we collapsed into total
civil war. Some days when I feel the violence everywhere, or watch
City Hall step on someone pointlessly, or see how little support there
is for the kind of work we're doing, I expect Los Angeles to happen
everywhere, and I wonder, very deep down, where I
will
be then.
Stavis and I sat for a minute, him with his 30 years and me with
my five years of the movement. Then he got a phone call, and went
