More About the Backlash

"Look at that! Look at that!" cried Alabama's Democratic Governor George Wallace. Eyes fixed on a TV set, fist beating on the arm of his chair, he was watching early returns from the Maryland presidential primary at his Towson, Md., campaign headquarters. The cause of Wallace's excitement was that, for the moment, he was leading Maryland's Democratic Senator Daniel Brewster, a stand-in for Lyndon Johnson. But as the votes piled up, Brewster pulled ahead, finally won 265,713 to 214,029.

Even so, Wallace had taken 42.7% of the record primary vote, and he talked triumphantly. "They called me a bigot, a liar, a racist, an agitator, a trespasser," he said. "They pictured my supporters with Ku Klux hoods. They called in ten Senators to beat us down, and yet a majority of the white people in Maryland gave me their support. I'm elated. That's far more than I ever expected."

In a wistful voice, Wallace added: "Just leading awhile, why that's something. If it hadn't been for the nigger-bloc vote, we'd have won it all." As it was, Wallace threw an awful fright into Maryland and national Democratic leaders, who are really beginning to watch that so-called civil rights "backlash" in the North.

Counting the Votes. There were reasons besides the backlash for Wallace's near miss. For one thing, Brewster is closely identified with the unexciting administration of Democratic Governor Millard Tawes, which this year took a long step down the road from popularity by increasing the state income tax by a full one-third. For another, Brewster himself, a much-decorated World War II marine, is a wealthy, gentleman-jockey type and a political lightweight who at first took Wallace's challenge much too lightly, then panicked and began taking it much too seriously.

It was impossible to tell just how much of Wallace's vote derived from such factors. But at the same time, there was certainly a civil rights backlash, and the voting pattern throughout the state proved it.

Along Maryland's rural, racially troubled Eastern Shore, Wallace carried all nine counties with more than three-fourths of the vote. In Dorchester County (Cambridge), the scene of recent Negro riots, Wallace beat Brewster by better than four to one. He also carried two of Baltimore's six districts. In each, blue-collar workers fear Negro incursions in neighborhoods and jobs. The heavily Catholic First District, where Negroes have already moved in alongside Greeks, Italians and Poles, gave Wallace 11,000 votes to Brewster's 8,000. In the Sixth District, now the home of many transplanted Southerners who came to Baltimore to find jobs in its big industrial complex, Wallace outdrew Brewster 10,000 to 9,000. In all, Wallace carried 16 of Maryland's 23 counties.

Brewster ended up taking the state's three westernmost counties, where the Negro population is small and civil rights are no problem. He also scored heavily in the well-to-do bedroom suburbs that skirt Washington. But his winning margin came from Baltimore's Jewish and Negro areas. The city's Fifth District, home of 80% of Baltimore's 90,000 Jews, gave Brewster 39,000 votes, Wallace 9,000. The lopsided results were much the same in black Baltimore. In 17 Negro precincts, Wallace got not a single ballot. Eighty-seven Negro boxes gave the Alabamian fewer than six votes per precinct against a total of 18,765 for Brewster.

The Militancy Issue. Wallace had based his campaign for Maryland's 48 Democratic Convention delegates on a strong pitch against the civil rights bill now pending before the U.S. Senate. But there was evidence that his vote came less in protest against the bill, in and of itself, than against Negro militancy and excesses.

Thus in another race, Joseph D. Tydings, a stepson of Maryland's late Democratic Senator Millard E. Tydings and a liberal who was outspoken in his advocacy of the civil rights bill, won the Democratic senatorial nomination over State Comptroller Louis Goldstein, the choice of the Tawes organization, by a 123,000-vote margin. Democratic voters also renominated all five of their party's congressional incumbents--and all had voted for the civil rights bill. On the G.O.P. side, Senator J. Glenn Beall, who also supports the bill, easily won renomination over Challenger James Gleason, who doesn't.

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