THE FEAR CAMPAIGN

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with which to counter the militants. All at once, Northern liberals discovered that integration could mean demonstrations in front of their schools, protest marches on their main streets. All at once, Negroes were not just a faceless social cause, but a community of individuals, some of whom could be as intractable, nasty, destructive—and racist—as some whites had been all along. And through these discoveries ran the nagging realization that the more the Negroes got, the more they demanded. That this is a universal human trait was beside the point.

Violence, Rap Brown observed, "is as American as cherry pie." History that most whites would rather forget supports him. Quite aside from the Ku Klux Klan's brand of oppression in the South, Northern whites rampaged against Negroes in riots in New York City; Springfield, Ohio; Greensburg, Ind.; Springfield, Ill.; East St. Louis, Ill.; and Detroit long before Negro upheavals came into vogue. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission counted 2,595 lynchings of Negroes in Southern states between 1882 and 1959. Not one resulted in a white man's conviction. Den nis Clark, writing in the Jesuit magazine America, makes the point that 100 years ago "the Irish were the riot makers of America par excellence."

But violence in those days was absorbed in the onward rush of American life and the abiding faith in progress. Violence today is different, compressed in vast, complex, overcrowded cities; and blacks are not immigrants nor do they share the immigrants' optimism. Actually there are signs at present that black riots are abating. Despite the chain reaction of violence in April, after Martin Luther King's assassination, the Justice Department counted 25 "serious to major" disturbances from June through August, compared with 46 during the same three-month period last year. The number of deaths went down from 87 to 19. The figures are hardly cause for rejoicing or complacency, but at least the trend is hopeful.

Still, TV has shown some of America's greatest cities under siege. It has shown Negroes carrying out loot from burned-out stores, sometimes while policemen and troops looked the other way. This sight, perhaps more than any other, contributes to the belief that Negroes are basically indolent and immoral, that law enforcement in the U.S. has broken down, that the black man is getting preferential treatment. That conclusion is directly contrary to the hallowed Anglo-Saxon tradition of property rights. The fact that mass arrests are not always feasible in chaotic conditions is ignored. The fact that indiscriminate shooting in a few of the riots, particularly Newark and Detroit, killed innocent citizens is forgotten, and the fact that police gunfire can prolong and worsen the initial disturbance is often overlooked.

Personal Crime

What concerns most people even more directly than student rebels and black riots is the fear of crime against the individual, of "the prowlers and muggers and marauders," in Nixon's words. No one questions that crime is growing. The issue is just how much, and whether the election-year emphasis on it is exaggerated. The primary fever gauge is the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. The last full-year figures, for 1967, show an absolute 16.5% increase over the previous year in the offenses covered. The crime rate, taking