On 12 January 1971, the federal government indicted Philip Berrigan and other East Coast antiwar activists on felony charges of plotting to impede the Vietnam War through violent action. The activists’ agenda supposedly included blowing up underground heating pipes in Washington to shut down government buildings, kidnapping presidential adviser Henry Kissinger to ransom him for concessions on the war and raiding draft boards to destroy records and slow down the draft.

The Justice Department prosecutors chose to hold the conspiracy trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a conservative area where a randomly chosen jury would be heavily against the defendants. However, before the jury was selected at what came to be known as the Harrisburg-7 trial, a group of left-leaning social scientists supporting the defendants interviewed a large number of registered voters in the area to try to figure out how to get a sympathetic jury there. They discovered, among other things that college-educated people were more likely than others to be conservative and to trust the government. Thus, in court, during the three weeks that it took to examine 465 potential jurors and pick a panel of 12, lawyers for the defense quietly favored skilled blue-collar workers and white-collar workers without a lot of formal educations—nonprofessionals, although the sociologists and lawyers apparently never used that term.

The lawyers were uneasy doing this, however, because it went against their intuition. The notion of closed-minded hard hats and open-minded intellectuals is widespread and is reinforced by mass-media characters like loading-dock worker Archie Bunker and his college-student son-in-law, “pinko” Mike. In fact, All in the Family made its television debut the very day of the Harrisburg indictments, 12 January 1971; by the time the trial and jury selection started, it had been on the air for a year.

Ignoring these false stereotypes paid off. The government put on a month-long, $2 million extravaganza featuring 64 witnesses, including 21 FBI agents and 9 police officers. The defense called no one to the witness stand. After seven days of deliberation, the jury was not able to reach a unanimous decision, and the judge declared a mistrial; but with 10 of the 12 carefully selected jurors arguing for a not-guilty verdict, the government dropped the case.²

Blue-collar skeptics? Loyal intellectuals? Was the Harrisburg survey a regional fluke? Look at what the nationwide polls showed at the time. On 15 February 1970 the New York Times reported the results of a Gallup poll on the war in Vietnam.³ Gallup had found that the number of people in sharp disagreement with the government over the war had increased but still constituted a minority. While this increase in opposition was important news, what were particularly interesting were the data on the opinions of subgroups of the population. These numbers announced with striking clarity that those with the most schooling were the most reluctant to criticize the government’s stand in Vietnam. There was a simple correlation (although only in part a cause-and-effect relationship): The further people had gone before leaving school, the less likely they were to break with the government over the war. (See note 3 for the results of the poll.)

2. New York Times, 13 January 1971, p. 1. Jay Schulman, Phillip Shaver, Robert Colman, Barbara Emrich, Richard Christie, “Recipe for a Jury,” Psychology Today. May 1973, pp.37-44, 77-84; reprinted in Lawrence S. Wrightsman, Saul M. Kassin, Cynthia E. Willis, editors, In the Jury Box, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, Calif. (1987), pp. 13-47. Jack Nelson, Ronald J. Ostrow, The FBI and the Berrigans, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York (1972). William O’Rourke, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York (1972).

3. New York Times, 15 February 1970, sec. 1, p. 4; or George Horace Gallup, The Gallup Poll, vol. 3, Random House, New York (1972), pp. 2237-2238. The question was worded as follows “Some U.S. senators are saying that we should withdraw all our troops from Vietnam immediately. Would you favor or oppose this?”

                        Favor   Oppose  No opinion

National average        35      55      10

By age group
21-29 years             39      57       4
31-49 years             36      56       8
50 and over             33      53      14

By extent of education
College                 29      64       7
High school             34      58       8
Grade school            44      41      15

From Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives by Jeff Schmidt, Chapter 1 “Timid Professionals”

Bold emphasis is mine.