Essay: TO REMEMBER FORGOTTEN AMERICA'

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THEY are the descendants of Jacksonian America. Once they were the heroes of the American democratic my thology. Walt Whitman catalogued them. Carl Sandburg cel ebrated them. "The people will live on," he wrote — mean ing the workers, the "common man" in a slightly nostalgic sense, the people nowadays referred to as the lower middle class. The traditional American values and ambitions sus tained them. Today, those virtues seem to many to be mocked and perverted. The white lower middle class feels dan gerously ignored, as outdated as Norman Rockwell's folksy icons. With justice, Richard Nixon calls them "forgotten Americans."

They live in overmortgaged, underserviced blue-collar ghet tos where they pay a stiffer price — in poor schools, en croaching throughways and war casualties — than do affluent whites across the city lines. Most of them still believe in God, country, the work ethic and a sexual standard that calls for at least a decent public restraint. In a day of diz zying moral change, they see themselves as the last defenders of moral authority. That is why they still admire the military and regard the police as heroes. The New York Times's Tom Wicker had a revelation at the Chicago convention: "These were our children in the streets and the Chi cago police beat them up." The Gallup poll recorded that 56% of the people interviewed approved of the Chicago cops. What those people meant was: "Those were our chil dren who were doing the beating." They also meant that their view of themselves as a last moral bastion has become ever more frustrating. Lower-middle-class Americans read of millionaires who pay no taxes. The clergymen whom they value lead open-housing demonstrations. They dream of sending their children to college, but the universities have become battlegrounds for black militants and white rad icals. Their bumper stickers suggest an apprehensive kind of jingoism (REMEMBER THE PUEBLO), and the decal Amer ican flags on their car windows bespeak a defensive patri otism (THESE COLORS DO NOT RUN). Patriotism as they see it is assaulted everywhere. "You're trying to teach your chil dren one set of values and every element of life around them shows you up as a square," laments Elaine Whitehead, a telegrapher in Bellingham, Wash. "Sometimes I feel like grabbing a burro and gold pan, packing up my family and heading for the hills."

Call It Hate Economically, they are the "marginal" whites who earn be tween $5,000 and $10,000 a year and represent 40% of American families. They are factory workers, storekeepers, small farmers, cab drivers, policemen, firemen, longshoremen, post al clerks, many public school teachers — and a number of the elderly. In theory, they have never been so prosperous.

Yet the median U.S. family income is still only $7,974 a year. According to the Labor Department, an urban family maintains a "poor" standard of living at $5,915 a year, while a "moderate" standard of living requires $9,076.