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But, the Tribune recalled, the editorial page of 1963 “still wouldn’t let it go.” Afterward, it “harrumphed” condescendingly that “the planners and participants can consider their job well done, and the residents of the capital, who had to put up with a day’s inconvenience, are entitled to acknowledgment of their patience. Such oratory as there was, was less superheated than might have been expected.”

The Tribune‘s flashback reminded me that eight years ago I’d quoted the same lines from the same editorial in a column on the sorry coverage of the march in the Chicago press. The haughtiness of the white voices raised preemptively against black mayhem is astonishing. No good would come of the show the civil rights crowd was cooking up—that was the common view. A Daily News columnist advised that the “apprehensions” of labor leaders that the march would get out of hand “are shared by most informed people.” The Tribune hit bottom when it appealed for a “rediscovery of reason,” citing a French sociologist’s warning that “like the savage and the child . . . the crowd is intolerant of anything interposed between its desires and their realization. . . . The organizers of the Washington march know all this, yet they have persisted in carrying forward this combustible affair.”

“Poverty is overcome by men able and intelligent enough to hold a job,” the Tribune thundered. “It is overcome as the post-war West Germans overcame it—by working harder, while their neighbors, the British in especial, hit the featherbed. It is not overcome by beatnik lie-ins and the riots of mobs in cities and on campuses. Nor will it be overcome by visionary boondoggles, politically inspired.”