Legalectric

I’d forgotten about the Minneapolis October 15, 1969 Moratorium and Teach-In against the Viet Nam war, over 10,000 showed up, and I was in that crowd. I’d taken a lot of photos and have no idea what happened to them, they’re gone. Anyway, I was looking that up, it’s now reduced to fuzzy memories, a wiki and compilations of photos from all over the U.S.

But I found this, and its really odd headline caught my attention. The similarities to issues today, the white backlash, the trumped up “fears” that had no relation to reality, and politicians’ capitalization and exacerbation of those fears to turn it into an election win. The 1971 Mayoral race was the first campaign I’d worked on, Stenvig had to go, but he won that election too.

This part in particular:

Political analysts, who were quite surprised by Mr. Stenvig’s victory, now believe he rode in on the rising bitterness of the forgotten middle-class over the establishment’s interest in the minorities, and on the issues of inflation, increased taxes, and encroaching freeways. Added to this was the reluctance of a normally Democratic electorate to vote for a Republican.

“There’s no doubt many people were more upset by what they heard was happening in other cities than what they saw here,” one observer said. “We certainly had a white backlash and it was a very big one because we have on of the largest populations of any city.”

Here we are, 50 years later…