Nation: NEW YORK: THE REVOLT OF THE AVERAGE MAN

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driver, the factory worker may, with luck and overtime, gross $9,000 or $10,000 a year, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it takes $9,977 a year for a family of four to maintain a moderate standard of living in New York City, where the living costs are higher than in any large U.S. city except Honolulu. These people, like the highly skilled members of the craft unions, who can earn more when business is good, tend to live in communities where ethnic ties are still strong. Whether they occupy one-and two-family row houses or ranks of monotonously alike apartment buildings, working-class families take pride in an orderly environment. They readily feel threatened by population shifts that change the makeup of their schools, road projects that cut up their neighborhoods, public housing projects that bring in welfare recipients. Like any citizens, they would like more and better amenities and services: a new school, park or playground, better transportation, sewage or public health facilities. But it is in Harlem that a large, new hospital just opened. It is programs aimed at helping blacks and Puerto Ricans that seem to monopolize the attention of public officials.

In New York political terms, the construction worker, the policeman, the telephone repairman already buy Mario Procaccino's brand of politics. They leave the Democratic Party only when it swings too far to the liberal side, and Procaccino has not done that. He also seeks to include behind his average-man barricade another, more elusive segment of the population—typified by the schoolteacher, the junior accountant, the shopkeeper, the middle-income lawyer or engineer who chooses to work for the government.

These professionals and small businessmen are often the sons or grandsons of immigrants, often the first of their families to have graduated from college or to have accumulated enough capital to become modest entrepreneurs. They have status but are not secure in it. They have aspirations for the good life but not quite enough income to achieve it. They cannot afford private schools for their children, and the public schools in many of their neighborhoods are bad. They cannot tolerate crime; yet it keeps rising. They are open to liberal approaches, but the city has had liberal administrations of one kind or another for as long as they can remember while conditions have grown worse.

They are aware of the Negro's plight and sympathetic to it theoretically, but in practice they wonder if the black is not demanding too much. They might not think of themselves as Procaccino's average men, but they are just as angry. Particularly they are angry at John Lindsay. One taxi driver, taking a passenger in from the airport, was cut off by an aquamarine Cadillac driven by a clean-cut, Ivy League type. "Damn it," the cabbie moaned, "they all look like Lindsay." A couple of college girls gathering signatures for Lindsay nominating petitions on a street corner were approached by a young man who seemed to want to sign. "These for Lindsay?" he asked. When assured they were, he urinated on the papers.

Serious Student

By Procaccino's self-serving criteria, he has more in common with the common man than either Marchi or Lindsay. Marchi's parents were Italian immigrants also, but of slightly higher standing than Mario's. Marchi's father came