What is holding us back?

In material terms at least, the panorama of American progress is stupendous. Poverty, racial injustice and crime rebuke American affluence, but it verges on fantasy to call the U.S. a failed society. No other nation has ever remotely matched the U.S. in both human and material resources. The American problem is almost purely one of logistics and priorities: how to use these resources far more wisely.

In the past ten years, the growth of the American economy has far outstripped the comprehension of most individuals; even economists are at a loss for an abstract theory to explain it. But beyond dispute is the fact that never before has man transmuted energy and raw materials into wealth at such a fantastic rate. With 7% of the global land mass and 6% of its population, the U.S. produces about one-third of the world s goods and services. Every five years the American economy grows by the equivalent of that of West Germany, the third largest industrial nation. In 1968, the U.S. gross national product was twice that estimated for the Soviet Union, and the output of one American corporation, General Motors, was greater than the G.N.P.s of all but 13 of the world's nations.

The knowledge inventory

Since 1960, the spendable per capita income of the average American -- even allowing for higher prices and inflation -- has increased by one-third. So has his productivity: 7% of American workers now produce all the nation's food and manufactured goods. Yet unemployment has steadily declined, until it is now at the lowest point in 15 years. While the U.S. worries about the hard core of "unemployables," it has a limitless demand for new skills. In the new information industry, the computer and related fields, 1,000,000 programmers will be needed in the next six years (v. 200,000 now so employed). Most of the economic targets of the '60s have been achieved. In the American economy, the immigrants' vision has been surpassed -- wealth undreamed of and seemingly without limit.

U.S. wealth rests not only on a huge industrial base but it also derives from the greatest inventory of scientific knowledge ever accumulated. Starting from a modest $74 million in 1940, the Federal Government steadily expanded its subsidy of scientific research and development to a peak of $16.7 billion in 1967. Though since cut back because of the Viet Nam war, this investment has added enormously to U.S. resources. In the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine and physiology, Americans have won 31 out of 63 Nobel prizes. Among the discoveries in pure science attributed to American scholars in the last decade are the total synthesis of cortisone, intense radiation in outer space (the Van Allen belt), the magnification of light (the laser) and the discovery of intergalactic gas.

A talent for management

As a nation of organizers, the U.S. has harnessed its new scientific knowledge to all kinds of new technology: the production of electricity by nuclear energy, communication by satellite, the Salk vaccine, oral contraceptives and a whole new spectrum of antibiotics -- to say nothing of learning how to put a man on the moon.

All these feats reflect one of the nation's most impressive resources: the American skill in managing great enterprises, whether in war or peace. The Manhattan Project, which built the atom bomb, and the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt shattered Europe after World War II, remain classic examples of this talent. Today's Apollo program is yet an other demonstration of how seemingly insoluble problems can yield to a systematic approach. The question naturally arises: why can the same skills not be used on the same scale to end poverty and traffic congestion, to clean up pollution and save the cities?

It is too easy to say that Americans have become too self ish to cooperate in attacking social ills. For all the present dis sent and division, all sorts of people throughout the country remain compassionate and responsive to need. Clearly, those qualities in the national character form a vital resource that can be tapped by leaders with drive, purpose and exciting ideas -- witness foreign aid, foundations, philanthropy. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has contributed $115.6 billion in aid to other nations -- a massive contribution, not withstanding the fact that it also served U.S. policy -- and supplemented the official amounts by uncounted millions in private philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation contribution to medicine has had worldwide benefits; the Ford Foundation is now contributing millions to pilot projects that may offer solutions to some of the problems of the cities. There is in the American temperament an evangelical conscience, and it can be aroused.

How can so prodigious and inventive a society have failed so conspicuously in so many areas? One flaw in the American psyche--and one of its strengths--is its single-minded concentration on one Big Problem at a time. In the past four decades, the nation's energies and imagination have been largely absorbed by the specter of economic instability, war, cold war and the nuclear arms race. At the same time, the rural American was becoming the urban American. The Negro became even more restive for social and economic equity. And the great engine of American success, industry, was practically given carte blanche to pollute the air and the water, with no implicit social responsibility to the cities it had helped to build.

The nation until recently did not have the aroused conscience to use its financial resources to deal with myriad problems at home. Now it should be able and willing to solve them. Still, what may really hold America back is precisely what has pushed it forward: the American's prized and highly developed sense of individualism, which can amount to plain selfishness. This is a relative matter; many Europeans, with their deep class conflicts, tend to be far more selfish than people in the U.S. But Americans, particularly in times of rapid and threatening change, have turned protectively in upon themselves, their families, their jobs. That is an understandable but fallacious approach to individual or collective life, since every American citizen stands to benefit or suffer as his whole society succeeds or fails. The success of the American experiment, as Thomas Jefferson argued in a somewhat different context, will depend on its success in "enlarging the empire of liberty." That is no longer true in geographical terms. In social terms, it has never been a more urgent task.

A lost place

What complicates the task is the state of the country's political institutions. To begin with--though no politician permits himself to say so--there is the U.S. Constitution, a triumph of 18th century rationalism, which is rightly revered for its dedication to individual liberty but in many ways is poorly suited to national governance in the 20th century. At Santa Barbara's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a mixed herd of scholars, politicians and journalists is currently rewriting the Constitution--a fascinating if somewhat impractical project (see box, 26).

The Constitution's most serious defect is that it subdivides the Republic into 50 states on geographical lines that no longer make much sense (except perhaps for Hawaii and Alaska). Ever since the Depression proved the state governments incapable of coping with national problems like unemployment, their governments have steadily lost place to Washington.

A diffusion of power

Below the state capitals, the diffusion of authority and proliferation of municipal governments makes for disarray bordering on chaos. The National Commission on Urban Problems reported that as of 1967, U.S. metropolitan areas were served by 20,745 local governments. Greater Chicago has 1,113 different and often competing local authorities; in the Philadelphia metropolitan area there are 876 separate municipal governments.

The writers of the Constitution believed that a diffusion of powers within the Federal Government would serve the commonwealth; they succeeded in creating three branches that gallop in three directions at different speeds. In its finest hours, such as the Army-McCarthy hearings, Congress may change the American mind and demonstrate its potential as the most dynamic member of the Constitutional triad. In its worst hours, it might as well be a backwater state legislature. Shackled by its own archaic rules (the Senate filibuster, the seniority system that casts aged conservatives as the satraps of powerful committees), Congress is all too often responsive to local interests at the expense of national interests. It is no accident that the Supreme Court, not Congress, pioneered in giving the Negro his legal due. It is hard to believe that even now Congress has no committees on urban affairs. Only once, in 1950, has the House, which initiates money bills, considered appropriations in toto. Instead, various committees too often cut or fatten piecemeal items in line with narrow interests--a highly inefficient way of allocating national resources. Though the Constitution explicitly reserves to Congress the right to declare war, the President in his conduct of foreign affairs actually determines the issue, reducing the role of the legislature to that of critic and commentator.

Meanwhile, the central Government has become so huge that its power seems virtually without limit. But in The Age of Discontinuity, Peter Drucker suggests that to a future historian "impotence, not omnipotence, may appear to be the remarkable feature of Government in the closing decades of the 20th century." While the Federal Government collects taxes with ruthless efficiency, it can no longer move the mails with dispatch; it spends vast sums on welfare, but Sociologist Daniel Moynihan says that it is "highly unreliable" as an instrument for ameliorating the lot of urban Negroes. The multitude of social programs through which it administers welfare funds lack central direction. Drucker believes that the central Government is trying to do too many things that should be left to other organizations functionally better equipped to handle these tasks. He feels that its role should be more and more restricted to making decisions, and that by doing less it would achieve more.

Interdependent partners

The new pattern of society already foreshadows this future role of Government. The U.S. now functions through a network of organizations in which Government, industry, labor and the universities are intertwined and obviously will become more so. In the Apollo program, NASA defined the mission, planned the flights and recruited astronauts; M.I.T. contributed to the design of the navigation system, North American Rockwell Corporation built the vehicle, and Pan American services the Cape Kennedy base. George Champion, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, believes that if private business addressed itself to satisfying the education and housing needs of the poor it could not only improve their lot but also find it profitable. As the New Left is quick to point out, the military relies on the universities for the science and technology of advanced weaponry.

If the President can mobilize the resources and skills of these organizations, they can be helpful partners. But they can also be effective barriers to reform. When their self-interest is threatened, they coalesce into political blocs that can impose vetoes on action. The farm lobby has prevented any realistic reappraisal of U.S. agricultural policies. Lyndon Johnson commanded the nearly undivided support of labor throughout his Administration, but he was unable to persuade the craft unions to modify their apprenticeship rules, which restrict the expansion of skills in the labor force and are, in effect, a racial bar. The business community has shown a belated but increasing interest in training "un-employables." However, in matters of air and water pollution created by industry many individual corporations continue to evade their responsibility for these conditions. Robert McNamara remained unconvinced as to the desirability of an anti-ballistic missile system, but the military was able to override his objections through political pressure and commit the country to the "thin" Chinese compromise.

A will for what? Great resources and balky institutions--what can the President do? Much of the advice that he has been tendered reflects the impatience inherent in the American temperament. J. Irwin Miller, a leading Republican and a much respected Middle West business leader, believes that the problems of the ghettos, crime and domestic unrest are so critical that they justify "going to war." By this he means mobilizing the nation as in World War II, when all of its energies were focused on the one goal of defeating Germany and Japan. The Kerner Commission on civil disorders said that the country's greatest need was to "generate a new will."

But a will for what? In a series of legislative acts affirming the equality of races, Congress declared the nation's objective to be the achievement of a biracial society. The greatest obstacle to that goal is the tense mood of fear, mistrust and hatred that corrodes race relations. Although a majority of blacks still subscribes to the ideal of integration, the increasingly vocal militants preach an American apartheid that would ultimately isolate Negroes from the mainstream of American life (see box p. 23). That such a solution would not only be accepted but welcomed by a great many whites is all too evident. Any meaningful integration of blacks must involve moving more and more of them into white suburbs, training them for skilled crafts and opening union membership. These are the specific steps that meet the most stubborn resistance from the white community.

In large part, the U.S. race problem is a problem of poverty. When President Johnson addressed himself to it, he proclaimed as a national goal the creation of a great society that would ultimately end poverty. He assembled the largest task force ever of the nation's scholars and experts; they produced a three-volume catalogue of its most urgent programs. These were later translated into far-reaching legislative proposals aimed at improving life in the cities, the esthetics of an industrial society and alleviating the living conditions of the poor. Legislatively, the Johnson Administration accomplished more in less time than any other in U.S. history. In 1961 there were 45 federal social programs with expenditures totaling some $9.9 billion; there are now 435, involving expenditures of some $25.6 billion. And yet Johnson failed conspicuously to "generate a new will."

Johnson's failure makes Nixon's task harder. His electoral mandate comes largely from what Spiro Agnew calls "middle Americans," who are often out of sympathy with the notion that the country must make a special effort, let alone special sacrifices, for the blacks. He must keep these people with him, and at the same time convince Negroes, who distrust him, that he is getting results for them. He must convince middle-class whites that black progress is in their interest, because it will benefit society as a whole. He must convince Negroes that a measure of patience is in their interest, because it will help enlist necessary white support. He must accomplish this almost impossibly difficult task while dealing with institutions whose nature it is to resist change. John W. Gardner believes that the U.S. must find a way to make society (and institutions) "capable of continuous change, continuous renewal and continuous responsiveness." This is a task not for one Administration but for decades. In this need is Nixon's opportunity--he can make a beginning.

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