the oppressed millions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The result was to strengthen support for the government's policy among people who might otherwise have condemned it. These tactics also heightened popular resentment of men like Dr. Spock—the "strutting pseudo-intellectuals" denounced by Spiro Agnew and George Wallace.

The experts who set themselves up as guardians of children's rights appeared to workers to encourage a spirit of insubordination and to weaken parental confidence. "These days you're afraid to punish the kid or you'll 'alienate' him.... Complexes! Complexes!" The jargon of therapeutic understanding and "compassion" seemed to absolve young people, lawbreakers, and other "victims" of an allegedly repressive society from any responsibility for their actions. Violations of social conventions went unpunished, while those who demanded their enforcement were criticized for "blaming the victim." The growing tolerance of profanity, sexual display, pornography, drugs, and homosexuality seemed to indicate a general collapse of common decency. American workers did not regard themselves as models of rectitude, nor did they adhere to a rigid morality that condemned every form of sexual self-expression. What they condemned was the public display of sex and pornography, especially in their deviant forms—the repeal of reticence. "If [people] want to live together and not be married, that's fine. If they want to read pornographic books and see pornographic movies, that's okay, ... as long as they don't broadcast it ... on television or in the newspapers." Right‐ wing criticism of the media struck a sympathetic chord in workers troubled by the publicity accorded to socially disruptive conduct. Their attack on "permissiveness," however, grew out of a sense of decorum, not out of an inflexible moral standard that left no room for tolerance or free speech. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union came under fire because they appeared to invoke the constitutional doctrine of free speech for purposes it was never intended to cover.

In an atmosphere inflamed by demands for an apparently unlimited right of personal freedom, on the one hand, and for the restoration of public order, on the other, even graffiti could become a political issue. Liberals saw the graffiti scrawled on subway cars as a vibrant new form of folk art, while ethnic workers saw them as part of the crisis of civility. In their eyes, the city's public facilities no longer belonged to decent, law‐ abiding citizens. The streets, parks, and subways had been taken over by

-495-