Nation: WALLACE'S ARMY: THE COALITION OF FRUSTRATION

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Ohio, however.) Forums in Milwaukee and Grand Rapids were S.R.O. when the former Governor appeared, and large crowds turned out for motorcades in such Northern strongholds as Chicago and Jersey City. About 20,000 ignored chill weather last week to hear the standard Wallace spiel on Boston's historic Common, which once was as far from Dixie in attitude as the other side of the moon. "They were really packed in there together," Wallace exuberantly told reporters. The other two candidates "would be proud to draw such a crowd."

Nixon or Humphrey would be even prouder to evoke the empathy and enthusiasm that Wallace so often arouses. With the campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy scarcely more than memories, the onetime bantamweight boxer is the only contender left who attracts such spontaneous support. Just as antiwar sentiment found expression in McCarthy, says Historian James MacGregor Burns, "the smoldering distrust among urban whites" is finding its voice in Wallace.

Though Minnesota is by no means a Wallace stronghold, 47 of 50 people who attend a volunteer firemen's party in Rockville are wearing Wallace buttons. In nearby Richmond, bowling is a little slower because a zealous pin setter takes time out to slap a Wallace sticker on each ball before he returns it. In the parking lots of auto plants outside Detroit, row after row shows a near-solid line of Wallace bumper stickers. White workers complain bitterly that management has forced them to remove Wallace emblems from their lunch pails.

At the big Buick factory in Flint, a poll of 8,000 members of United Auto Workers Local 599 showed that 49% will vote for Wallace, 39% for Humphrey, 12% for Nixon. Alarmed, labor leadership has quietly dropped its usual pre-election drive to register all union members, and is concentrating instead on black neighborhoods, where Humphrey can count on solid, if unenthusiastic support. The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Committee on Political Education (COPE) has distributed thousands of pamphlets documenting Wallace's consistent antilabor record in Alabama. Few members seem to read them or note that COPE rated the Vice President a 100% supporter of labor when he was in the Senate.

Sinking Feeling

Blue-collar workers make up a large proportion of Wallace's supporters, and he has a special hold on the less educated and the less affluent. He attracts the union member who fears for his seniority, the homeowner who is afraid that Negroes will lower property values in his neighborhood. He voices the unease of the housewife who does not want to see her child bussed to an integrated school, of the middle-aged who are outraged by student protest, of the ten-hour-a-day man who is upset by welfare programs and feels that Negroes are too lazy to work. Often the Wallace supporter, typically a central-city resident, feels that he is not understood by the suburbanite who does not have to worry about racial violence and crime in the streets. Indeed, many in the Wallace constituency have eminently reasonable complaints, even if they are not always recognized by liberals or the policymakers in Washington that Wallace derides. The lower middle class is hurt by crime, high taxes, inflation and the other ills of the 1960s. It cannot comprehend why, and has a sinking feeling that its world is falling apart.

White policemen and firemen