town," let alone the means to carry it out; but even if they had, they would not necessarily have been the better for it. If racial enlightenment could be achieved only at the price of exile, perhaps it was time to reconsider the whole project of enlightenment. *

"Populism " and the New Right

The battle over busing, whatever its effect on young people caught up in it, clearly had a devastating effect on the old liberal coalition. Of all the "social issues," as they came to be called, that divided the New Deal coalition down the middle—abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, the death penalty, gun control, gay rights, school prayers, the pledge of allegiance, judicial lawmaking—busing was the most fiercely contested and the most dramatic in its exposure of the growing distance between

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* Daniel Monti's study of school reform in St. Louis contains a similarly ambiguous example of successful integration. Monti reports a conversation with a white student in his sociology class at the University of Missouri. The desegregation plan in St. Louis, unlike the one in Boston, required suburban schools to accept black pupils from the city. Monti's student drove a school bus: "I take white county kids into the city and black kids back out to the county schools." Having explained the nature of his job, the bus driver proceeded to describe his black passengers.

"God, you oughta hear the way those black kids talk! They're unbelievable."

"That bad, huh?" But I did not really want to know.

"No, no!" he snapped back. "They're that good."

"What do you mean 'that good'?" I asked.

"Just that. I mean they sit there talkin' algebra and poetry for the whole bus ride. It's wild." He paused, then added, "I don't know where they get those kids, but it ain't from no ghetto family."

The bus driver, Monti adds, "knew from his daily experience what many observers of the desegregation order had been complaining about. The black youngsters who 'volunteered' for long bus rides to county schools were not like their peers left back in the city." On the contrary, they were carefully selected as likely prospects for social mobility, gifted with the ambition to overcome the ghetto in the same way that Vinnie overcame Charlestown.

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