LARCENY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

IT was just an ordinary day. Mom was at the store, taking back a party dress she swore she had never once put on (it was only slightly stained with lipstick). Sister, browsing in the Teen Scene department, was staring with fascination at a pair of earrings she might just forget to pay for, if no one was going to be looking too hard. Sonny was in school, doing pretty well on a math test by dint of some judicious copying from a friend's paper. And Dad was busy at the office, adding a few fictitious lunches to his expense account and wondering about the feasibility of his company's renting another suite in Miami to be written off as a business expense.

While this is hardly a picture of the typical American family, it does represent a pressing moral problem that has been largely obscured by the more dramatic issues of war, sex and civil rights. The problem is the erosion of Everyman's conscience about how he conducts his everyday life in less spectacular areas. A nation's ethical climate is made up of small, half-automatic decisions taken by ordinary people in response to life's daily bumps and urgings. That climate in the U.S. today seems far from salubrious.

Some of the alarmists who see every act of dishonesty as a symptom of general corruption make the mistake of judging people by Utopian rather than human standards. A spark of larceny leaps in everyone, and the scene would be dull without it. Nor is the evidence about dishonesty clear-cut.

Everybody is supposedly eager to cheat the Government on his tax return. That impression is reinforced by the occasionally epic search of U.S. business for tax loopholes--which may be ethically debatable but are, by definition, not illegal. In fact, the American is a model taxpayer, and was so even before Internal Revenue installed its formidable, automated data-processing system known as "the Machine." The Government last year indicted fewer than 2,000 out of 102.5 million taxpayers for fraud. Even the most pessimistic estimate of unreported income--$26 billion a year--suggests that more than 95% of all income was reported.

Second only to taxes, credit is seen as an area of everyday fraud. Initially, America's burgeoning credit-card business suffered considerable damage from high livers who could buy now but not pay later. The magic inherent in those little plastic rectangles hypnotized many into becoming adventurers--such as the man whose idea of the good life was to bed down in a variety of hospitals on stolen Blue Cross cards. But such abuses are now insignificant--thanks to more responsible screening of applicants and automated accounting techniques--even though credit keeps expanding. In department-store charge accounts, the default rate is only 1 % or 2%. The U.S. lives in a credit economy that is essentially based on trust and responsibility.

With all this conceded, there is still plenty of evidence to support those who fear that America is becoming a nation of smalltime chiselers.

Boosters & Snitchers

Shoplifting, for instance, is dramatically on the rise, and the value of the average item taken from supermarkets has risen from $1.11 in 1961 to $3.06 in 1965. Most shoplifters, whether professionals ("boosters") or amateurs ("snitchers"), are women, perhaps because the female form and the clothes that cover it best lend themselves to secreting a variety of boodle. Pros use such props as "Jane Russell bras" and "booster bloomers"; sometimes a roomy coat is fitted out with interior hooks that can turn a little old lady into an ambulatory notions counter. Many an obviously pregnant shopper has been delivered as soon as she got home--of anything and everything except a baby. "Booster boxes," apparently well-wrapped packages equipped with hinged flaps, are standard equipment for both amateurs and professionals. Some of the devices get to be pretty special ized; pizza boxes are ideal for boosting or snitching phonograph records. On Madison Avenue, naturally, stealing acquires tone: Abercrombie & Fitch reports that its shoplifters use booster boxes made from attache cases.

Store owners are striking back. Small items, such as razor blades and lipsticks, are kept near the cashier and made as large as possible by encasing them in plastic bubbles and affixing them to cards. Large convex mirrors are scattered about as much for their deterrent effect as for surveillance.

One ingenious piece of psychological warfare is the "spook" technique: a supermarket customer suspected of slipping something into her pocket is confronted by the manager, who silently and significantly drops an identical item into her shopping cart. The shocked snitcher is frequently so embarrassed that she returns both items before leaving the store. A favorite object of snitching is the shopping cart itself: hundreds of thousands disappear each year to become baby carriages, barbecues and laundry baskets.

By current estimates, one out of every 52 supermarket customers is secreting at least one item that will not be paid for. Somebody will pay, though--the 51 honest customers to whom the cost of America's $2 billion-$3 billion annual shoplifting loss is passed along in higher prices, together with the cost of the security guards, preventive devices and legal prosecution of those who are caught.

A variant of shoplifting that is plaguing department stores is refund chiseling. Perhaps the refunder merely preys on a store's concern for customer good, will to wear a dress once, then take it back, pretending to herself that her intentions were honest all along. On the rise, though, is the practice of picking up something and bringing it up to the counter as yesterday's purchase being returned. Stores that normally require a sales slip will often waive the rule for a flustered lady who perhaps produces the "wrong" slip, legitimately acquired with a lesser purchase.

Finger Bowls & Bibles

Business and industry lose uncounted millions to the depredations of employees--from the clerk who pre-empts stamps and stationery to the truckdriver who knocks off work with a truckload of company products for his own private enterprise. There is the classic case of the aircraft company on the West Coast, which one evening instructed its workers as they left the factory to assemble in the yard. The management intended to take a group photograph, but the workers assumed that there was going to be some kind of inspection, and the ground was suddenly littered with hastily abandoned tools and equipment.

Such petty thefts are growing, and so are big-time dippings into tills. Last year an estimated $1 billion was embezzled from U.S. business.

Stealing from one's employer is often hardly considered stealing at all. According to Harvard Sociology Professor Chad Gordon, people either justify it by such unconscious mechanisms as "The company has it coming" and "They owe it to me" (because they didn't give me a raise), or cheaters neutralize their dishonesty by saying "Everybody does it." People play down their peculations, says Gordon, "with attitudes like 'It's the right of every good union man to take home so many power tools a year.' They feel as if it's owed to them in the same way that academics feel that publishers owe them free books or top executives feel the company owes them a country club."

Bigness--and the impersonality that goes with it--is an invitation to the everyday dishonesty of upright citizens. Who knows this better than the telephone company? Legend has it that the first pay phone, installed in Hartford, Conn., in 1889, was loaded with slugs on its first day's operation. Since then, human ingenuity has been taxed to find new ways of robbing public phones, ranging from stuffing the coin slots with paper to tampering with the wires that control the coin release. Another popular device is to use the phone to transmit signals without paying; this is done by letting the phone ring a certain number of times or by making incompleted person-to-person calls to one's own home according to a prearranged code. Hotels are traditional victims. New York's Americana lost 38,000 demitasse spoons, 18,000 towels, 355 silver coffee pots, 15,000 finger bowls and 100 Bibles during its first ten months of operation. Ski resorts have had so much pilferage of equipment in recent winters that they have taken to putting plainclothesmen in ski clothes and searching outbound buses.

The big insurance companies are considered fairest of fair game. A flash flood can turn into a windfall for the average suburban chiseler; old cracks in the foundations, bucklings in walls or walks--all kinds of ancient damage--are claimed for the wind and water of the moment. A crumpled fender can be padded into a complete overhaul for the family car with the aid of the friendly garage mechanic ("Don't worry, I do it for all my customers"). Then there are lucrative medical claims. The increasing occurrence of whiplash--the jolting of the neck by rear-end collision, which is attended by a galaxy of vague and often prolonged symptoms--has proved a boon to the insured and a bane to the insurers. Companies can only wince and add the cost of cheating to their rates. It comes to a sizable sum; the claims bureau of the American Insurance Association estimates that 75% of all claims are dishonest in some respect and amount to an overpayment of more than $350 million a year.

Cheating in Class

The child is father to the man. Beyond question, student attitudes toward cheating have deteriorated. "You used to catch them, and they'd feel guilty," says a Brooklyn high school teacher. "I'd rip up their papers and give them a talking to in private. I don't do that any more. I just rip up the paper and walk away. I'm afraid to lecture them. If I did, they'd think I'm out of the dinosaur age."

The proportion of students who cheat is a tricky statistic to arrive at. In a recent survey made for the National Broadcasting Co., 65% of the national adult average said that they had cheated in school at one time or another. Perhaps because they are more honest, 75% of the clergy and 78% of the teachers sampled confessed to having cheated. A study by William J. Bowers at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research put the figure at 50% to 60%. But however many of them do it, students tend to regard cheating almost as an open option, like whether or not to wear a necktie. Many even seem uncertain about what constitutes cheating in the first place. Dr. Malcolm Klein, a social psychology lecturer at the University of Southern California, says that in a survey he worked on in Boston, a majority of students "thought there was nothing at all wrong with answering 'Present' for another student, submitting as one's own a paper written by another student in a past year, or submitting the same paper to more than one class."

Most student cheaters stick to the time-honored devices --notes on facial tissue, watch crystals and various accessible portions of the anatomy--though electronics have been pressed into service by the gadget-minded, who use radio transmitters to beam information to tiny receivers disguised as hearing aids. One company has introduced a battery-operated PockeTutor to fit into the breast pocket, in which a note-crammed tape can be rolled behind a transparent window by means of a switch on the student's wristwatch.

Yet in a few schools and colleges, there is practically no cheating at all. Perhaps the most famous of these is the University of Virginia, where an honor system was first established in 1842. Virginia is old-fashioned enough for the old ideal of "gentleman" to be given some meaning. A code of honor, says Dean Hardy Dillard of the Law School, "demands not that an individual be good, but that he be unambiguously strong--a quality generally known as character. The man who lies, cheats or steals is fundamentally weak." It may, in other words, be morally wrong to gamble but completely honorable. The dishonest thing is to cheat.

At Virginia, all examinations are unsupervised. If one student suspects another of cheating or otherwise acting dishonorably, he is bound by his loyalty to the school to investigate the matter secretly and speedily and. if still convinced of the other's guilt, accuse him to his face; if no convincing explanation is forthcoming, he must demand that the other student leave the university within 24 hours. The accused can do so--and no one else will ever know why--or he can appeal to an eleven-man student committee. The enduring success of the honor system is attested to by the Virginia National Bank, which claims that its branch in Charlottesville, which is heavily populated by University of Virginia alumni, has the lowest incidence of bad checks of its 32 branches.

At Haverford College, examinations are not only unproctored, but students can take most of them whenever they want during a nine-day period. This requires the maintenance of a tightly buttoned lip in the presence of those who have not yet taken the exam; conscientious students have been known to turn themselves in (and be disciplined) for leaving an exam muttering, "Boy, that was a stinker!" within earshot of a fellow student in the same course.

The honor system requires too many special conditions of consensus and tradition to be widely workable, especially given today's huge student bodies. The alternative is to have strict rules and stringent supervision. And this, according to the findings of Bowers' Columbia study, leads to more cheating. It's like the difference between a supermarket and a neighborhood delicatessen, says one undergraduate. "When you were a kid, did you steal from one of these big supermarkets? A lot of people do, but nobody steals from the deli because you know the guy depends on you not to."

Personal dishonesty is excused or at least explained by a great many arguments. Many Americans, particularly the young, blame hypocrisy in the society at large. Says Poet Kenneth Rexroth: "The kids pick up a paper and read some editorial condemning the Free Speech movement, and then turn the page and find an entertainment section that looks like the wallpaper in a Hungarian whorehouse."

From Guilt to Shame

There is much cynicism about everything from TV commercials and pressagentry to politicians with ghostwriters, the implication being that this is the modern way of doing things. A lot of blame is also put on the high pressure of modern life, on the drive for success at all costs, on the decline of old ethical restraints. As long ago as two decades, Anthropologist Ruth Benedict observed that the U.S. was changing from a "guilt culture," in which people's consciences restrained them, to a "shame culture," in which the main deterrent was fear of getting caught.

All this may be true enough, or at least half true, but such assumptions are usually accompanied by the nostalgic and false notion that the past was better, more straightforward, more honest. The fact is that in freewheeling 19th-century America, high-level fraud was far more spectacular than today, when business, trade and politics must function under rigid controls and searching publicity. What has increased is the opportunity for the pettier kinds of cheating, largely because of the growth of communities and of population. In the urbanizing world in which crossroads are turning into shopping centers, towns into cities, and cities into megalopolises, nobody knows his neighbor's name--or feels responsible to him. The impersonality of the supermarket, the super university, the super-corporation gives the individual a guiltproof out: "After all, I'm not hurting anybody in particular."

Yet whatever the rationalizations, most people, if pressed, will face up to and admit their own missteps. There are no accurate measurements, but this is suggested by many factors, from opinion surveys to the behavior of defendants in court. It is a hopeful sign, because perhaps the worst part of dishonesty is being dishonest with oneself. As Groucho Marx said: "There's one way to find out if a man is honest--ask him. If he says yes, you know he's crooked." Americans on the whole do not seem to overrate their dishonesty--or their honesty, either.

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