Uneasy Calm

The silence in the cities was almost eerie. For the first time in more than two months, slum streets--at least for the time being--were safe and peaceful. Governor George Romney ended the state of emergency in Detroit, Newark nursed its still gaping wounds, and other cities across the nation reviewed the reasons and remedies for riots.

Negative 90th. Most Americans looked to Washington for action. There was little indication, however, that either the President or the Congress--which is becoming known as the "negative 90th"--was of a mind to propose any major attempt to improve the lot of the slum dweller. Under the chair manship of Mississippi's archsegregationist James Eastland, the Senate Judiciary Committee continued hearings on the causes of the disturbances, as it considered a House-passed antiriot bill, doing nothing to assuage critics' fears that it was more concerned with repressing slum violence than averting it. The committee called on Leonard Kowalewski, a Newark turnkey who hinted of a conspiracy behind the Newark riots and charged that federal anti-poverty workers helped to bring about the trouble. Nothing like proof was offered.

"Is it true that these rioters have be come a privileged class in this country?" asked Arkansas' John McClellan, who will shortly lead his own subcommittee on a riot investigation. "Are they above the law?" Kowalewski assured him that they were. Massachusetts' Edward Kennedy, who has tried to induce the committee to call on urbanologists as well as policemen for explanations, was nonplused. "The quality of witnesses wasn't high to begin with," one of his aides said after Kowalewski appeared, "and it's retrogressed since." As if to underline the approach it intends to take, the Senate at week's end rejected 36 to 26 a motion that would direct McClellan's own in vestigation to delve into social and economic factors behind the riots.

Humdinger. In the House, meanwhile, a Republican-Southern Democratic coalition inserted strong antiriot measures into the President's anti-crime bill before sending it on to the Senate. (Other changes would give the states nearly total control over how federal anti-crime grants would be spent, sharply curtailing the supervisory role of the Attorney General.) In the upper chamber, predicted Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, the measure, which gives $75 million to local police in the first year, will be combined with the House-passed antiriot bill, which makes it a crime to cross state lines to foment riots. The result, promised Dirksen, "will be a humdinger."

The contrast between the G.O.P. in Congress and the state houses could not have been sharper. Rebuffed in his efforts to get the National Governors Conference to act urgently on the ghetto crisis, New York's Nelson Rockefeller, chairman of the G.O.P. Governors' policy committee, brought together seven of his moderate Republican colleagues,* all but one of them from urban states, to Manhattan for a day-long conference on what the states can do about slum problems.

Though the program they endorsed was not particularly novel, it did make 60 specific recommendations in the fields of law enforcement, education, slum rebuilding and job opportunities that would make slum life more tolerable. While eschewing any hint of political oneupmanship, Rockefeller's bold call for state action undoubtedly helped to solidify his position as the leading spokesman for the G.O.P. on urban problems and one of the few national politicians who have any real understanding of ghetto conditions.

The states can indeed do much more than they are now doing, but any real hope for progress--as the Governors' statement recognized--still lies with the Federal Government, which alone has resources sufficient for the task. Despite a flurry of imaginative proposals from both sides of the aisle, there was little hope that Congress--dominated by its aging, rural-oriented committee chairmen--would open up those resources without a strong push from the electorate. Yet the man in the best position to stir the American conscience, the President, seemed unusually phlegmatic about the urban crisis.

Though Johnson did act quickly to see that more Negroes will be recruited into the National Guard--as urged by his new Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which reported that Negroes number only 1.15% of the total Army Guardsmen--and directed that the organization be better trained in riot control, his general reaction was one of unhurried stoicism. Accepting a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln from an Illinois group, he observed mildly: "We have been experiencing some of the same problems Abraham Lincoln did 100 years ago. We hope and pray that we can handle them with the compassion and wisdom that he did."

No one could disagree, but some, like Massachusetts' Senator Edward Brooke, thought that prompt, decisive action was also imperative. "It is up to the President," he said, "to stimulate and enlighten the electorate and sell public support for the programs he needs." Brooke added that to wait a year for the full report of the President's Commission, of which he is a member, might prove disastrous. "In a year," he warned, "we could have insurrection. The cities could be burning."

*Michigan's George Romney, Maryland's Spiro Agnew, Rhode Island's John Chafee, Pennsylvania's Raymond Shafer, Massachusetts' John Volpe, Colorado's John Love and South Dakota's Nils Boe.

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