A Modern Utopia

Contemplating the President's State of the Union message, Poet Carl Sandburg took the long view that his 87 years permit him. "I like his direction in general," said Sandburg. "He is no McKinley."

Everybody could agree on that. Depending on the point of view, Lyndon Johnson's distinctly non-McKinley vision gladdened or irritated the future inhabitants of his Great Society. Editorialists, naturally, were divided (see PRESS), and cartoonists had some fun with Johnson's boldness and prodigality. The most typical reaction seemed to be broad general approval--and a disposition to wait for specifics.

Remarkably, Johnson offered the widest-ranging program for improving U.S. life since the days of Franklin Roosevelt (in quantitative terms he easily outdid Harry Truman, who loved to barrage the Congress with proposals), and embraced everything from the fight against disease to the triumph of beauty--and yet did not make a single proposal that could be considered either radical or revolutionary. In its way, the speech was a masterpiece of Lyndon Johnson's brand of leadership, which consists, as he himself has put it, in looking at the stars but doing the possible--a form of engineering consent rather than inspiring irresistible enthusiasm.

City of Promise. In the long run his program might draw less criticism from conservatives than from liberals, some of whom already complain that, despite the most impressive electoral victory in decades, Johnson is proceeding with extreme caution. ("Now let's not make a lot of people angry," Johnson constantly counseled his aides during the drafting of the speech.) It is nevertheless a program that promises substantial accomplishments because much of it has an excellent chance of being accepted on Capitol Hill (see The Congress).

On civil rights, Johnson's pledge to "eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and opportunity to vote" drew widespread Congressional approval. In his requests for medicare, aid to education, emergency procedures for temporary tax cuts, the President sidestepped the most controversial features or built in compromises to disarm critics. His suggestion that the Taft-Hartley Act should be changed, with its hint that he wants to rescind state right-to-work laws, seemed on the radical side--until the White House passed word that Johnson does not intend to press for this in the near future.

Johnson offered a fascinating rainbow of proposals to improve the American environment, including a White House conference on natural beauty, rapid trains between big cities (four hours from Boston to Washington, a thought that chilled not a few Bostonians), desalinization of ocean water, purification of the air, creation of parks and "a green legacy" for the future. He was describing, in his own phrases, "the City of Promise," and in its attention to detail, the vision was almost worthy of some of the classic Utopians such as Etienne Cabet, who dreamed of a noiseless, dustless community, and Charles Fourier, who wanted to make lemonade from the sea. On closer inspection, the President's Utopian proposals were certainly within the realm of the possible in an America that feels it can do anything. The question for the people to decide was whether they would want a Federal Government to do it--at a cost as yet unspecified.

How Good? Johnson conceded that the Great Society might take generations to construct, and his emphasis on the quality of life, while it would have perhaps sounded more natural coming from John Kennedy, introduced a refreshing note. "The Great Society asks not how much, but how good; not only how to create wealth but how to use it; not only how fast we are going, but where we are headed. It proposes as the first test for a nation: the quality of its people." Johnson's speech, in the view of Government Professor Samuel Beer of Harvard, takes politics out of its previous formula. Says Beer: "During the New Deal right up until the Kennedy Administration, the great concern of politics was redistribution. We now have the means for solving the economic problem; Johnson is less concerned with the distribution of material things than he is with raising the general level. The Great Society is largely based on education."

The speech aroused a good deal of speculation about where and how Johnson had latched on to the phrase "the Great Society." While there was apparently no single source (just before he mentioned it at Ann Arbor last May, he had been talking with Writers John Steinbeck and Barbara Ward, among many others), two possible inspirations are particularly intriguing. One is a 1927 book by Pragmatist Philosopher John Dewey, in which he discussed the "search for the Great Community" in terms of liberating individual potentialities; the other is a 1921 book by British Fabian Socialist Graham Wallas entitled The Great Society, which advocated beauty and serenity in a harsh, industrialized world through the psychological "Organization of Happiness." Whether or not Lyndon is indebted even indirectly to these sources, he is certainly a pragmatist, dedicated to organizing happiness in the U.S. and, if possible, the world.

Creative Inertia. Actually the least happy part of his speech concerned the world. Almost his only concrete suggestion in foreign affairs was that Russia's rulers visit the U.S. and, by implication, that Lyndon visit Russia--hints that so far have apparently not been taken up by the Kremlin. He tried to play on the divisions between Russia and China, claimed that for the last four years "no new nation" had gone Communist (technically correct, but hardly meaningful), and gave a low-keyed assurance about the U.S.'s staying on in Viet Nam.

He also suggested that the U.S. hence forth will expect more respect from all nations and more help from its allies: "We will not, and should not assume it is the task of Americans alone to settle all the conflicts of a torn and troubled world." At times Johnson struck a nice balance between selfless service and enlightened self-interest in U.S. dealings with the world, but in sum, as Paris' Le Monde put it, on foreign affairs, he suffered from "creative inertia."

The President was perhaps at his best, and most himself, in his peroration. Said he: "The presidency brings no special gift of prophecy or foresight. You take an oath, step into an office, and must then help guide a great democracy. The answer was waiting for me in the land where I was born. It was once barren land. But men came and worked and endured and built. Today that country is abundant with fruit, cattle, goats and sheep. There are pleasant homes and lakes, and the floods are gone.

"Why did men come to that once forbidding land? Well, they were restless, of course, and had to be moving on. But there was a dream--a dream of a place where a free man could build for himself and raise his children to a better life--a dream of a continent to be conquered, a world to be won, a nation to be made. Remembering this, I knew the answer. A President does not shape a new and personal vision of America. He collects it from the scattered hopes of the American past."

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