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> Marjorie Benton, 37, is the daughter-in-law of former Connecticut Senator William Benton, the publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Active in politics since the first Adlai Stevenson campaign, she has been an effective Mc-Govern fund raiser, drumming up over $1,000,000 from wealthy acquaintances and friends. "There are a lot of people being left out of the benefits of the society," she argues. "Benefits such as being able to get off welfare and get a job. To have decent cities and play areas and unpolluted lakes. It sounds Utopian, but I really feel that way. I feel very privileged, and I just wish everyone had as much as I do. And I'm willing to give up something and try to have that happen. Money is a product of society, and I really feel that you owe it back to society."
Harvard Sociologist David Riesman sees the McGovern constituency as an expression of the anti-institutional force that has long existed in American life —a force today heavily represented in the press, the advertising community and the liberal Protestant and emancipated Catholic clergy. Says Riesman: "Their attitudes have strong roots in frontier anarchism and feelings of independence"—though it is a frontier and an independence quite different from Nixon's version.
Riesman argues that the McGovern constituency is basically a professional elite but "is not part of the institutional, organizational, day-by-day America. They don't think this America is really necessary, that it can all be done mechanically. They have very little sense of that other day-by-day America." It may be that McGovernites, in espousing income redistribution and higher inheritance taxes, have profoundly misjudged the American character and some of its deepest aspirations. Even some of McGovern's own supporters use the curious argument that such proposals are not to be taken entirely seriously because, after all, Congress would still be there to put the brakes on any idea it thought too radical.
As an example of that lack of touch with the other America, Riesman cites the abortion issue. "It was madness to confront the country with it at the convention," he says. "It's an issue of great importance to liberated women—and others of course—but think of the unliberated women. For many of them the right to get an abortion simply means that they have no way of holding on to their men when they get pregnant. A considerable part of the blue-collar and farm population only gets married when the girls get pregnant." That tactical judgment is quite aside from the moral substance of the question which matters greatly to many people who consider abortion simply wrong. Nor is abortion in any sense a significant campaign issue; McGovern's present official stand is the same as Nixon's—the matter should be left to the states to decide —and there is no doubt that in the near future the U.S., as a whole, will allow women to have abortions more or less at will.