Molly Michelmore
APSA 2005
reoriented itself around the politics of a new and powerful “middle-class consciousness.”
The Family Assistance Plan was part of Nixon’s broader strategy to appeal to
working-class white voters in the North and South to build a New American Majority
from the ashes of the New Deal Democratic coalition. Nixon had resurrected his political
career by remaking himself into the spokesman of the “forgotten American.” As a
presidential candidate, he gave voice to the “silent majority’s” sense of betrayal, directing
his appeal to the “non-shouters, the non-demonstrators . . . the good people . . . the
decent people . . . who work hard and . . . save . . . and pay taxes . . . and care.”
Although the president’s campaign strategy focused its appeal to the vast “middle-class
majority,” in his first two years in office, the president’s policies often aimed their appeal
at an explicitly blue-collar, working-class voter. Influenced by Kevin Phillips’s work on
the “emerging Republican majority,” Pete Hamill’s study of the “rage” of the white lower
class, and a host of anthropological studies of the “frustrated,” “disillusioned,” and
“angry” white majority, Nixon hoped to integrate white working-class voters into a new
and lasting political coalition.
The FAP, which offered the vast majority of new benefits
to white workers in the North and the South, was one part of this broader, working-class
strategy.
This working-class and Southern strategy, however, soon proved politically
bankrupt. In pursuing the so-called “Southern strategy” in the 1970 midterm elections,
the president and the Republican Party had suffered significant setbacks.
The
president’s difficulty in drumming up public support for the Family Assistance Plan too
2
Richard M. Nixon, Acceptance Speech to the Republican National Convention, August 8, 1968.
3
Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969.) For a
reprint of Pete Hamill’s article, see Louise Kapp Howe, ed., The White Majority: Between Poverty and
Affluence, (New York: Random House, 1971), Chapter 1.
4
See Matthew D. Lassiter, “Suburban Strategies: The Volatile Center in Postwar American Politics,” in
Meg Jacobs, William Novak and Julian Zelizer, The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American
Political History, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 327 – 349.
3
Convention