When you’re my age you don't have to ask: Are Americans really materially better off than they were in the recent past? Those of us born in the 1920s and with vivid memories of the Depression simply know how much better things are. The improvement is implicit in almost our every memory, every experience.
Even for comfortable middle-class people life was much more difficult and insecure in the 1920s than it is today, If he was fortunate enough to have central heating (less than one third of the population in the 1920 did), middle-class Dad had to pull himself from bed at 4 a.m. on cold winter mornings to unbank the furnace and shovel coal; if he overslept, the pipes froze. But he usually didn't have to rake leaves or shovel snow. Not in the 1930s. That was done by shabby, humble men who knocked at the back door mornings, asking for a warm meal in return for doing chores.
In 1921, when this magazine was four years old, the typical American workweek was 60 hours, and many people worked longer. The most common American household appliance was a woman, who worked a lot more than 60 hours in her home. Leisure-time industries scarcely existed because few people had leisure. For more than half the population, the family toilet was a hole in the backyard with a shack built over it. In those shacks, Scott Paper products competed with difficulty against old Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs; real toilet paper was a luxury.
Senior citizens? We called them old folks, and they were old in their 50s; if they were lucky if one of their kids had a spare room for them, maybe in the attic. Life expectancy was about 54 years, which was just as well because there were few pensions beyond what the gold watch might bring at a pawnshop.
I'm not talking about the 19th century. I’m describing the first three or four decades in our own century. Unless they blow their money and energy on booze or drugs, the American have more physical comforts today than the average American did when FORBES appeared 75 years ago.
We've come a long way, and although the rate of improvement has slowed lately; our economy put on an amazing performance in this century. So amazing that almost every U.S. consulate has a waiting list for immigration visas.
Yet just last week on television, I watched a sweating Bill Clinton harangue a midwestern audience. Work with me to change America, the candidate shouted, punching the air, Kennedy-like, with his fist. That cliché produces expected cheers and waving of banners. Cut now to a local living room where a TV reporter, interviews a well-dressed middle-aged woman. What did she think of the speech? “I liked it” she said. "God knows we need change in this country."
Change from what to what? The lady didn’t say and the newscaster didn't even think to ask; everyone just assumes the country is in rotten shape. Where do they get their certainty? From the mass media that keep telling them that the economy is a mess, America is a mess.
Peggy Noonan got it right in the essay that follows in this issue: "It is writers - journalists, screenwriters, novelists, newswriters - we turn to more than anyone to tell us exactly how our country is doing, and they are precisely the last people who would accurately point out that in the long tape of history this is a pretty good few inches...."
But where do the media mandarins get their feeling that these are bad inches on history's tape? From writers and academicians, of course. Especially from writers and academicians who have a low opinion of capitalism and of American popular culture. The media machine turns this highbrow griping into sound bites and data bites and feeds them to the masses.
To mark this magazine's 75th anniversary, the editors wanted to look behind the sour moroseness of the media and seek more profound explanations for the prevailing angst.
At the start we decided: no economists. They have nothing to tell us about the real reasons for America's turn-of-the-millennium discontent, so starting on page 58, eleven of America's best writers and scholars give their noneconomic explanations for the blue funk oppressing Americans.
Each essay is an attempt by the author to answer our question: Why do Americans feel so bad when they've got it so good?
Varied as the answers are, there is a fairly common thread. It isn't the national debt or the unemployment rate or the current recession that bothers the nation's thinkers. It's not an economic mess that they see. It's a moral mess, a cultural mess. While the media natter about a need for economic change, these serious intellectuals worry about our psyches. Can the human race stand prosperity? Is the American experiment in freedom and equal opportunity morally bankrupt?
Reading the essays that follow isn't a comfortable experience for one who believes deeply in this country and its values. Without exception these brainy Americans (and one Brit) see us in a moral crisis. But without exception they lift the level of discourse above that found in the papers and on the tube, where we are punished hourly with mindless keening about distribution of wealth, the greed of the rich and the rights and wrongs suffered by this minority and that allegedly oppressed group. It isn't the economic system that needs fixing, most of our essayists say. It's our value system. As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (page 120) puts it: "I am not talking about ... psychobabble.... I am talking of the justified discontent of the responsible citizen who discovers that economic and material goods are no compensation for social and moral ills."
Some of the essayists conclude that pessimisms is justified and that we are in grave risk of going to hell. Harvard historian Simon Schama writes "More housing starts, a little leap in ‘consumer confidence’ ratings, or a pick up sales may signal some sort of return short term cheerfulness, but these indices say nothing about the deep systemic sicknesses that may in the end determine that the American will have lasted, in fact, for just 50 years.”
"It's an old joke in our family that the Schamas have an uncanny knack for following collapsing empires. A century and a half ago we were subjects of the Ottoman Empire; then, as that disintegrated, took ourselves off Habsburg Vienna; thence, in my parents' generation, to Edwardian Britain. And here I am."
It may be that the Schama family will have to flee once more. But it's well to remember this is a country where the intellectuals almost always felt cut off and unhappy. Just because people write well doesn't mean they can predict well or even accurately judge the precent, Saul Bellow, the great novelist (page 98) dismisses a lot of the current doom-saying these words:
"When I was young the great pundits were personalities like H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw or Havelock Ellis or Romain Rolland. We respectfully read what they had to say about communism, fascism, peace, eugenic, sex. I recall these celebrities unsentimentally. Wells, Shaw and Romain Rolland brought punditry into disrepute. The last of the world-class mental giants was Jean-Paul Sartre, one of whose contributions to world peace was to exhort the oppressed of the Third World to slaughter whites indiscriminately.
"Lincoln Steffens, playing the pundit in Russia after the Revolution, said, ‘I have been over into the future, and it works.' Some secret wisdom! As a horseplayer he would have lost his shirt.So, before you lose your shirt and faith in the country, read the essays that follow and decide for yourself what is behind the American angst-amidst-abundance. I personally like political scientist James Q. Wilson (page 100) writes: "Cheer up, Americans. You are right to be grumpy, but there is no system for governing a large, free and complex society such as ours that is likely to do much better or make you less grumpy. If you don't believe it, travel.”
And when you get back from Sweden Japan, Germany and Cuba and hear our politicians and our ideamongers shouting about changing America, ask them: Change it to what? At what cost?
Oh, Our Aching Angst by James W. Michaels page 47
You’d Cry Too If It Happened to you by Peggy Noonan page 58
Where Is The Space to Chase Rainbows by John Updike page 72
So Much of The Joy Is Gone by Dick Schapp
There is Simply Too Much to Think About by Saul Bellow page 98
The Contradictions of an Advanced Capitalist State by James Q. Wilson page 110
A De-moralized Society? by Gertude Himmelfarb
Two Nations… Both Black by Henry Louis Gates Jr page 132
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alfred Kazin
Are We All Feeling Better Yet? A Tragicomedy in Four Scenes page 160
An Awakened Conscience by Paul Johnson
The Decline of the West by John Ashbery
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