American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  What to do? Americans had turned to the federal government and found it isolated from the “mainstream of our Nation’s life.” People were looking for “honest answers” and “clear leadership” and not finding them. Rather they found in Washington “a system of government that seems incapable of action. … a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.… every extreme position defended to the last vote.” The nation, he warned solemnly, was at a turning point, one path leading to “fragmentation and self-interest,” the other toward common purpose, toward the restoration of “true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.”

  The reaction of press and people was as extraordinary as the speech. At first it was sharply positive, both in editorial columns and in the polls. Then the President, to show that he meant business, brusquely sacked several high officials whose loyalty and effectiveness he questioned. To the public, the disarray that Carter had dramatized in his address was suddenly evident in his own Administration. An aide to one of the fired officials was reminded of the story of the king who told his minister that he had been looking out of the window and perceived that his country was in trouble. “But sire,” replied the minister, “that’s not a window—it’s a mirror.” A ground swell of criticism enveloped what was now dubbed the “malaise speech” although Carter had not used the word. Confidence in the President sank further a month later when the President accepted the resignation of his old friend Andrew Young as ambassador to the United Nations after it was revealed that Young had violated an official ban against meetings with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and then lied to the State Department about what he had done.

  In the spirit of Winston Churchill, Carter had given one of the most candid, realistic speeches an American President had ever made. But he was no Winston Churchill. His speech was a political failure because, in contrast to Churchill’s defiance, he had followed up only with the popgun of reshuffling Administration posts. It was an intellectual failure, for Carter spoke rhetorically rather than analytically about the problems, failed to define the “true freedom” and other values he celebrated, and refused to spell out specifically what he would propose to do about “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” The disarray indeed appeared to be in Carter’s government—and in his mind.

  In essence the speech was a kind of cri de coeur—a heartfelt appeal for national unity, for seizing “control again of our common destiny”—but just how these rousing political war cries, however sincerely uttered, could be translated into policy and action was left unclear. The address did not hang together. While its first half was filled with grim generalities—the President warning against fragmentation, excessive individualism, against a “growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions”—the second half detailed an energy program. The preacher and the engineer did not connect. Was it curious, or inevitable, that one of the most thoroughly thought-out and skillfully crafted presidential messages of recent times should reflect the central weakness of the American intellect—the Tocquevillian void between the lofty plane of abstraction and the immediate “pragmatic” action?

  The ultimate paradox was the self-admitted failure of Carter and other leaders during a decade devoted to celebrating the great men of the 1770s. Reminded of the achievements of the likes of Washington and Franklin— and even more, of their conviction, their absolute dedication to their causes, their willingness literally to lay down their lives for independence, for liberty, for the Revolution—the Americans of the 1970s could be pardoned for comparing them with the LBJ of Vietnam, the Nixon of Watergate, the honest but faltering Carter, the hundreds of politicians who served as nothing more than brokers eternally calculating their self-interest in executive chambers and legislative halls.

  Many Americans, however, did not need to reach back two centuries to realize the current state of “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” They had grown up in the era of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, of Stimson, Hughes, Willkie, and Eisenhower, of Truman and Marshall and Acheson, of administrators with the gritty idealism of Harold Ickes, David Lilienthal, Frances Perkins. Younger Americans remembered the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, who had given up their lives, and the astronauts who had risked theirs.

  In other fields too Americans glumly contrasted the current crop with the old. Who in music in the 1970s and 1980s could compare with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson of the 1930s and 1940s? What pundit could stand with Walter Lippmann for the sheer range and depth of his grasp of issues both philosophical and practical? Who in literature with Faulkner or Frost or Hemingway? Who with John Dewey in philosophy, Reinhold Niebuhr in theology, Hannah Arendt and Harold Lasswell in social analysis, V. O. Key in political science? Where were the newspaper publishers and editors who could rank with Henry Luce or Ralph Ingersoll for creativity and innovation? Where was the equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture, of Martha Graham in dance, of Dave Brubeck in jazz, of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz in photography, of Alfred A. Knopf and Harry Scherman in book publishing and distribution, of Edward R. Murrow and William Shirer in radio, of Robert Hutchins in higher education, of Paul Robeson in music and drama?

  Habits of Individualism

  The mounting popular concern during the 1980s over the innumerable ills afflicting the republic—widespread crime, pervasive corruption, illiteracy, school dropouts and other signs of failures in education, drug and alcohol dependency, AIDS, a rash of teenage suicides—led to those time-honored resorts of perplexed Americans: legislative investigations, citizens’ study groups, “blue ribbon” commissions at the national, slate, and municipal levels. These investigators made numerous suggestions, most of them useful and some of them even carried out, but the more that reforms were put into effect, the more it became evident that the roots of the cultural disarray lay deeper in the body social and politic than simple, isolated remedies could reach.

  Hence investigators looked closely at attitudes and behaviors shaped within the family and absorbed by children literally at their mothers’ and fathers’ knees. The 50 million “married couple families,” as the Census Bureau identified them—about half of them “with own children under 18”—were so numerous and diverse as to make generalizations about them so general as to be commonplace and to conceal the enormous variety of learning and socialization experiences these families—especially the children—were undergoing. To many investigators it seemed more fruitful to explore the impact on attitudes of the two preeminent institutions outside the family that influenced Americans from a very early age— the church and the school.

  The number of members claimed by American religious bodies in the 1980s was staggering—over 140 million, in 344,000 churches, synagogues, and other congregations, served by over 300,000 clergy of all denominations. The enrollment in Sunday schools or their equivalent numbered almost 30 million. As striking was the enormous diversity of religion in America. The National Council of Churches listed over eighty separate nationwide religious bodies claiming memberships of at least 50,000— among them the United Methodist Church with 9 million adherents, the Southern Baptist Convention (14 million), the Presbyterian Church (3.1 million), the Roman Catholic Church (52 million), and the Churches of Christ (1.6 million). Across the nation a half dozen or so Protestant “splinter” churches each numbered several million members. Memberships in non-Christian faiths were sizable; Jews, for example, were estimated to be 5.8 million strong.

  Church and temple involvement by members was another matter. The percentage of Americans attending a weekly religious service wavered between 30 and 33 percent during the 1940s, rose to almost 50 percent during the late 1950s, and then leveled off to about 40 percent during the 1970s. The question of church influence over members was still another matter, and a most complex one. Asked over the years, “At the present time, do you think religion as a whole is increasing its influence on A
merican life or losing its influence?” a cross section of Americans who answered “losing” rose to a high point of 75 percent in 1970 and then leveled off, at least for a time, to around 50 percent in the late 1970s. The ratio of church membership to population also stabilized, at around 60 percent. These overall figures concealed a degree of flux among denominations. Between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s several of the “mainline” Protestant churches lost over four million members, prompting painful self-examination on the part of church leaders.

  Despite the shifting allegiances and the shallow affiliations of many, the potential influence of church and temple remained substantial. How much of that potential was realized? Of preeminent concern to investigators during the years after Vietnam and Watergate was the extent to which religious leaders not only inculcated specific everyday values of honesty, courtesy, tolerance, and the like, but, even more, offered their congregations some transcending vision of the good life and the good society and a sense of moral coherence, such as a grasp of the interrelated values of liberty, equality, and justice. Religious teachers and learners alike displayed the dichotomy Tocqueville had noticed between the flowery abstractions appealing to all and the specific belief meeting individual needs, with little connection between the two.

  Many Americans, Robert Bellah and his associates noted, had lost a “language genuinely able to mediate among self, society, the natural world, and ultimate reality.” They often fell back on abstractions when discussing the most important matters. “They stress ‘communication’ as essential to relationships without adequately considering what is to be communicated. They talk about ‘relationships’ but cannot point to the personal virtues and cultural norms that give relationships meaning and value.” The fragmentation of American religion into an endless diversity of sects and organizations exacerbated these tendencies.

  Many years earlier, Henry Thoreau, on hearing that after a tremendous effort Maine and Texas had been connected by the magnetic telegraph, had asked, What in the world did Maine and Texas have to say to each other? What did ministers and their flocks have to say to one another in the 1980s? Religious leaders and followers, Catholics and Moslems and Jews, the profusion of Protestant leaders and sects—could they communicate, whether in agreement or not, only in empty banalities and stereotypes? If so, would they drift further apart, falling back on their own internal languages, parochial ideas, and individual interests?

  Like religion, American education was massive in scope and endlessly fragmented in structure. By the early 1990s, according to mid-1980s projections, 50 million students would be enrolled in all public schools, elementary, secondary, and college, and another 9 million in private schools at those levels. Not included in these estimates were the 10 or 20 million persons who would attend a variety of alternative, special education, vocational, and other schools. Such figures raised again the old paradox of American education. Public schools were the nation’s biggest collective enterprise and at the same time its biggest experiment in socialism. For a century or so, American mothers and fathers, all the while denouncing nationalization of industry in other countries, had been putting their beloved children into the hands of government bureaucrats employed in government-controlled enterprises located on government-owned land, at the children’s most impressionable and vulnerable ages.

  The people’s confidence in the state-run public school system had been magnificently vindicated. Mass public education had elevated the minds and skills of tens of millions of youngsters, and helped to equalize their opportunities. At the same time, this socialism, as a potential source of indoctrination in “collectivist” ideas, had been a toothless tiger. Ample criticism there had always been—of the teachers, the textbooks, the curriculum, the principals, the coaches. At the same time the teachers in general were too cautious, the classes too pedantic, the reading too tame, and above all the schools too regionalized and localized in their leadership and direction for the public school system nationally to become controversial. Private schools, moreover, afforded parents an alternative—or an escape; thus the enrollment in private secondary schools almost doubled in the decade following the Supreme Court’s antisegregation decisions in Brown and other cases, as whites sought to evade integrated public schools.

  What was happening inside the 85,000 public schools? In the wake of huge rises in spending for public schools during the post-Sputnik years, study after study supported one high school senior’s answer: “Dullsville.” The “recitation syndrome” continued, according to a Harvard Educational Review report based on data from over 1,000 elementary and secondary classrooms. Classes, typically ranging from 30 to 35 pupils, were dominated by teacher talk, which took up over four-fifths of the time. Little used were such teaching and learning devices as give-and-take discussion, demonstration, the encouragement of informed questioning and student decision making. There was a kind of “hidden” curriculum based on authority, linear thinking, intellectual apathy, “hands-off learning.” The investigators quoted Alvin Toffler: education is “not just something that happens in the head. It involves our muscles, our senses, our hormonal defenses, our total biochemistry.” In American classrooms, the study concluded, rote was king.

  American schools adapted to the political and community environment, Richard M. Merelman concluded, by reducing the intellectual quality of the training. This meant deemphasizing the academic competence of their teachers; setting achievement levels low enough to ensure that most students “passed”; blurring the differences between facts and values in politics; emphasizing the ritual of class participation over its quality.

  Dullsville did not lack variety of course choice. Some listings of courses offered hundreds of selections and resembled university catalogues. After studying the formal curriculum, with its array of offerings from Calligraphy to Beginning French to Income Properties Management, along with the “extracurriculum” of clubs and sports, and noting the psychological and social “services curriculum” offered by some schools, three education experts wrote a book titled The Shopping Mall High School.

  The 3,300 institutions of higher education—the 2,000 four-year and the 1,300 two-year colleges and universities, the 800,000 or more full-time and part-time teachers, the 12 million full-time or part-time students—did not escape the same accusations of intellectual disarray, moral purposelessness, lack of clear priorities, variety beyond healthy diversity. If the typical big high school could be compared to a shopping mall, big universities were a mall, with their long and glittering array of specialized courses, adult programs, artistic and dramatic productions, stores, banks, eateries, big-time athletic contests, and other public and private enterprises. The missing ingredient, observed economist and former Grinnell president Howard R. Bowen, was a set of values. After decades of vigorous growth, wrote Ernest Boyer and Fred Hechinger, American higher education was confused over its goals, lacking in self-confidence, uncertain about the future.

  Why? Higher education was adrift, Boyer and Hechinger said, because the nation was in some respects adrift. Universities were no longer enlisted in the fight against economic depression, the all-out effort to win a global war, the race with the Russians to the moon. Others believed that the purposelessness and disarray lay much more within higher education itself—in the enormous amount of intellectual and curricular specialization, in the privatization of young scholars obsessed with gaining advancement through publishing rather than teaching, in the conflicts among values as well as the confusion in values. Political theorist Michael Walzer noted a fateful tendency of the “American liberal approach to moral” life in education either to relegate values to private life and thus cut them off from public discourse and education or to reduce values to quantifiable cost-benefit analysis and thus evade the harsh task of making moral choices.

  Those who attacked religion and education for lacking clear values as guidelines and intellectual and moral coherence were not always willing or able to offer coherent critiques. It was
often not clear what kinds of values they were urging—whether “modal” values, modes of conduct such as honesty, fairness, civility, courage, fidelity, honor; or those substantive, palpable goals, “core” values, such as liberty, justice, equality, community; or instrumental values, such as democratic procedures, which had some intrinsic worth but were also means of achieving broader, substantive ends. Thus in debates over civil rights there might be confusion as to whether the issue was a core value like equality, an instrumental value such as free speech or majority rule in achieving equality, or a modal value such as the orderly, fair-minded, honest, civil, and responsible conduct of the debates.

  Even more critical than these ambiguities was the particular set of core values held by critics of excessive educational diversity and religious heterodoxy, many of whom supported, indeed would have given their lives for, a core value that buttressed that diversity and heterodoxy—individual freedom. “Freedom,” wrote Robert Bellah and colleagues in Habits of the Heart, “is perhaps the most resonant, deeply held American value. In some ways, it defines the good in both personal and political life. Yet freedom turns out to mean being left alone by others, not having other people’s values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one, being free of arbitrary authority in work, family, and political life. What it is that one might do with that freedom is much more difficult for Americans to define.” This, it appeared, included American intellectuals, but fortunately this did not keep them from trying. Typically they proceeded by making the case against individualism, as they found it in Reagan-era America.

  That case was eloquent and powerful, if not novel. Individualism eroded or snapped the human links between persons and their families, religious leaders and groups, teachers and fellow students, neighbors and fellow workers. “The decline of church, state, and class as centers of culture in America,” Richard Merelman wrote in 1983, “has created unusually extreme individualism among Americans,” leaving “the individual alone and adrift in an often alien social and political universe.” They were concerned, Bellah and his associates wrote two years later, that the individualism described by Tocqueville with a mixture of admiration and anxiety “may have grown cancerous—that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.” Bellah and his colleagues were especially alarmed by the stimulus that religious sects gave to individualism, which in turn created an intellectual environment in which sects flourished.