Draft Chapter II - Overall Report

November 6, 1957

CHAPTER II

SOME BASIC CONCERNS

Every society comes to grips with existence in a different fashion.

From the sum total of life-experiences which may be very similar, different peoples choose different events as meaningful, different goals as worthy of effort. Looking back over their histories, they regard different occurrences as preventable and therefore as failures; and looking forward into their futures, they regard different courses as possible and therefore as hopes. From their identification of past failures and future hopes they define their present concerns.

Thus in the concerns of a people we find a key to their orientation to life. That is why it is more penetrating to appraise a society by its problems than by its achievements. Past achievements are not in themselves measures of current worth. Even present achievements tend to be the result of past concerns which have been defined and which are now being satisfied. But in the known and unsolved problems of a society are its living concerns. Here is its active quest for values, its current decision as to what things matter. A society to which many things matter will have many problems; a society to which nothing matters will have none.

A society without problems is a society without vistas. For its problems are not evidences of failure. On the contrary they are the indispensable fore-runners of social betterment. They are a nation's self-awareness, and thus they determine what a nation's opportunities are to be.

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This is particularly true of an open society such as our own. Tradition-bound societies inherit definitions of what life is and how it is to be lived. Authoritarian societies have their life-choices thrust upon them. But open societies must constantly renew their concerns. Their successive generations must test the tenets of previous generations, and reaffirm or reject judgements made in the past but not binding in the present. Hence an open society, if it is at all vital, must be troubled. If it were not, it would have no soul.

And so we begin our prospectus of the American scene by paying heed to some of its basic concerns. It is not because we are unmindful of or ungrateful for past and present achievements that we turn our attention to America's problems. It is because through our problems we may better understand the kind of people we are. And it is through our problems that we discover what our future achievements may be.

## II

What are some of the basic concerns of America today?

Any consideration of our problems and opportunities must start with a close look at the *people* from whom the nation derives its character, and for whom, in the final analysis, it exists. Before one can speak of America, one must have in mind some picture of that diverse and yet cohesive multitude of beings who call themselves Americans. And so we begin with the simplest

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of questions: How many of us are there? Where do we live? How old are we, how young? What do we do for a living?

At the present time we number about 170 million, making us the fourth largest country in the world after China, India and the Soviet Union. Every day of the year 11,200 babies are born -- nearly 500 every hour, more than eight every minute. And every day of the year another 500 new Americans arrive among us by immigration. Considered in relation to the ever-declining death-rate -- and the certainty of subsequent declines as additional diseases are conquered by medical science -- the existing birth rate indicates that the population of the United States will reach a figure of 220-225 millions by the year 1980. It has been estimated that if the present birth rate is maintained the population of the United States a hundred years from now will reach the staggering figure of one billion.

As remarkable as the increase in numbers is the mobility of the American people. During an average year about 20 percent of the American people move from state to state, county to county, city to city, or perhaps merely from house to house. During the year 1954-1955, for example, 31,500,000 Americans changed their places of residence, many of them over distances of thousands of miles. This is not a new phenomenon. It reflects the individualism of our society and its history of conquering a wilderness by solitary effort. In the days of the pioneers it was said that when one could see the smoke of one's neighbor it was time to move on. And this psychology remains to this day. The American does not derive security from living in dwellings handed down in a family through generations or in cities whose main

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features have remained unchanged for centuries. On the contrary, in a society based not on status but achievement, mobility has become a measure of attainment, one means of confirming progress: thus the ease with which Americans change residences, the lack of concern with which we replace traditional landmarks.

As a result, the percent of the American population who leave the state of their birth has remained relatively constant; it is now almost exactly the same as in 1900 -- 32 percent. However, the nature of the movement has changed from generation to generation. Since the incipient days of the republic the movement has been largely westward, but whereas the westward wanderer of the 19th century was typically a farmer seeking new fields and pastures, in the thirties he was likely a refugee from eroded, worn-out or drought-striken lands, seeking employment in the rich valleys of California. Today he is apt to be an industrial worker, drawn to the great new industries that have sprung up on the Pacific Coast since World War II. But he is also drawn by sunlight and warmth, and this motivation has deflected the western movement in recent years somewhat to the south. Today the fastest growing states are in the southwest -- California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada -- and in the east, Florida, swollen by an influx of elderly, retired people who, by virtue of the new prosperity, can retreat from northern winds and snows to the gentle airs of the Gulf Stream and the Gulf of Mexico.

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An even greater change has been wrought by another kind of migration -- the movement from rural to metropolitan areas. Only fifty years ago we were primarily a rural people; fewer than one-third of Americans lived in cities. By 1930, the average American lived in small towns of 5,000 - 10,000 inhabitants. By 1950 more than one-half (55.9 percent) had moved to big cities or their suburbs. By 1975, if existing trends continue, more than 70 percent will be city dwellers. Within the last decade, America's farm population has radically decreased. In 1920 there were 30 million Americans living on farms or 28 percent of the population. Today, despite a far larger national population, there are only 22 million or 13 percent of the population and the exodus continues: a million of our rural population leaves the farm each year.

Another notable aspect of the mass movement of the American people is the fact that the greatest population increase has occurred not in central metropolitan areas, but upon their peripheries -- in the suburban and "exurban" fringes that ring them in ever-expanding concentric circles. The rapid growth of Connecticut and New Jersey in recent years actually reflects the growth of New York City, as the growth of Maryland and Virginia reflect that of Washington. This expansion of the suburbs tends to blur the distinctions between rural and city life. As country people move to the cities, the cities are swiftly expanding into the countryside. Four-fifths of the nation's entire growth between 1950 and 1955 took place in these urban fringes of the great

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cities. In the next generation, if present trends continue, well over half of the American people will live in the suburbs. Suburban living is becoming *the* American way of life. The result is the formation of great city belts which stretch in almost unbroken lines along our coasts -- one such runs from Boston to Miami -- and large city-states which mushroom out from Chicago, Pittsburgh and similar centers. Overspreading city, county and state lines, posing new problems and meanings for "local" government, these vast metropolitan complexes constitute the new living environment for America.

The causes for the twin migrations from the farm to the cities and from the cities to the urban countryside are to be found in the explosive growth of our economy. In the city are found the opportunities for economic advancement unavailable in the more static regions of our rural economy. However difficult conditions may be in the city, they are to millions in the countryside a first step up the economic and social ladder. By the same token the growth of the suburbs is a symptom of our constantly multiplying middle-class. The suburbs are a symbol of success -- however standardized -- in the struggle for advancement and status; they are a reflection of the fact that America is rapidly becoming a one-class country and this class the middle class.

But while the metropolitan complexes are growing at their periphery their vital centers is in severe jeopardy. The cores of almost all our great cities face serious problems of transportation and of access. The concentration of low income groups in the cities and of the middle class in the suburbs has

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led to a deterioration of many of our metropolitan centers, particularly of their residential areas. It has been estimated that in 1950 about 20% of the dwellings in our cities were in blighted areas. Another 17% though not in slums fell below good standards and were a menace to their neighborhoods. The result is a line of demarcation which can be found in nearly every great American city today: in the center, extreme contrasts of luxury and decay; on the periphery, growth and orderliness of environment.

The decay of the inner city involves economic consequences of vast magnitude; it also has social consequences which slum conditions permit and encourage, such as the problem of gang warfare and juvenile violence. And the solution of many of these problems is complicated by the fact that the exodus of the younger civic-minded element to the suburbs tends to create a vacuum of leadership within the problem-ridden core.

In a later chapter we shall discuss what we can do to arrest urban decay and to revitalize our metropolitan areas. But we would not have fully faced the problem itself if we failed to call attention to what is perhaps its most tragic characteristic. This is the fact that a large proportion of the low-income residents of the slum core are Negro. In the single decade between 1940 and 1950 the non-white population more than doubled in 30 big U.S. cities and increased by an average of 44.3 percent in all cities of more than 50,000 inhabitants. Between 1940 and 1950 the Negro population of Los Angeles increased by 116 percent; the Negro population of Buffalo,

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Detroit and San Francisco doubled; and Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and New York had increases of 60 percent. It has been estimated that within the next three decades Negroes will constitute between one-quarter and one-half of the total population of at least ten of the biggest cities in the U.S. The proportion may become even greater as the "pull" of the northern cities become stronger with the growing solidity and stability of the resident Negro communities and an increase in their economic opportunity.

One fact is universal, in the North as well as in the South: Negro residences are segregated. As the Negro population has expanded, the white population has moved outward to the suburbs. Crowded and confined within their Harlems in every city, the Negroes are compelled to pay far higher rents in proportion to their accommodation than white people. In order to meet the exorbitant rents exacted of them, families double up and triple up within dwellings designed for single family units. Given the disproportion of their generally lower incomes to the generally higher rents they have to pay, and given the evil effect of over-crowding, the growth of Negro residential sectors inevitably means the deterioration of the heart areas of many of the greatest cities into slum districts.

To be sure the Negro migration into the city has its hopeful aspects. For if the separateness of the Negro is a standing indictment of our failure to realize fully our historic ideal of human equality, his dispersion from his original home in the South is a sign that the Negro is finally and perhaps belatedly entering the mainstream of American life. The route to the city is

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the classic avenue of economic advancement taken before the Negro by successive waves of foreign immigrants. Thus in some respects the problem of adjustment of the Negro migrants does not differ substantially from that of low-income urban groups from abroad in previous decades. In both cases, an essentially rural population bringing with it rural patterns of behavior has had to adapt to a society of mass production, and has had to gain a sense of identity and dignity while striving for economic and social advancement. In the case of the Negro as in that of the immigrant from abroad, there is the hopeful likelihood that his social status will be at least ameliorated as his economic position improves.

However, there is no reason to be complacent about the position of the American Negro. If we have lessened some of the injury of race discrimination we have not even begun to touch its insult. The most hopeful aspect of the racial problem in the United States is the general recognition that it in fact constitutes a major national concern. A great effort is now needed on all levels if we are to repair this single gravest moral flaw of our nation.

Finally, it is well to remind ourselves that the Negro problem is in fact a microcosm of a world problem. If we do not succeed at home in giving equal dignity and opportunity to the minority who are colored, it bodes ill for the future of the world's minority -- who are white.

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III

No less significant than the changes in our numbers and habitat
is the change in the component age levels of the American people.

For one thing, there are not only more of us, but we live longer.
Year by year, advances in medical science have prolonged the life span
of the American individual and multiplied the number of elderly people in
the nation. By 1930 most of the major epidemic diseases -- smallpox,
yellow fever, choiera -- had been eliminated from the North American
continent; by 1950 most of the serious infectious diseases -- pneumonia,
syphilis, diptheria, scarlet fever -- had been conquered by the discovery
of sulfa drugs, penicillin, and other antibiotics. Now the challenge of
medical researchers is to find means of checking or curing the major
organic diseases -- heart and circulatory ills, which presently account
for one-half of all deaths today; and cancer which, according to current
rates, will bring death to 40 million Americans now alive. If the brilliant
breakthroughs of the past can be repeated with respect to chronic diseases,
it will not be long before our present life expectancy of the Biblical "three-
score-years-and ten" will be extended upward into the eighties or even
nineties.

It is ironic that this gift of life looms as one of the most serious
contingencies that each family in America will presently have to face. In
the decades preceding World War I, households often encompassed several

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generations -- great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children. Today, the trend toward urbanization has largely disintegrated the multi-generation family. The average American household has come to consist of parents and children with grandparents living apart. Thus the physical disabilities of old age have in many cases been compounded by the psychological torment of loneliness. That is the situation that prevails today in most American families.

The psychological problems of age are made still more difficult to bear because the older person is not only rejected by his family, but by his society. To put it more politely, he is retired. Our retirement age has constantly gone down, partly because of the mistaken notion that it is a reward for strenuous exertion, and more importantly because of the ever-increasing pressure to achieve fluidity in the most desirable positions. Where position defines achievement, rewards for exertion cannot be too long delayed. Thus the typical retirement age is now 65 and it is creeping downward, despite the fact that this age no longer coincides with the impairment of mental or even physical productive ability.

The problem is not, of course, to deny retirement to those who wish it: indeed the level of subsistence of many of our publicly pensioned aged is much too low to permit those who have sought respite to enjoy it. Rather, the tragedy is that in a society where the individual defines himself by his achievement, retirement too often takes on the poignant overtones of the end

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of meaningful life. Only thirty years ago, when but one person in twenty was 65 or older, this was a matter of personal concern. But the problem is rapidly acquiring an entirely different dimension. By 1975 one in ten of us will be "over-age." Thus a tenth of the nation's population -- and a far larger percentage of its work force or its electorate -- will face the private and social limbo of retirement. This is not only a loss of skill and talent which we can ill afford, but a multiplying of psychological privation on a national scale, to the point where the tone and outlook of our whole society could be affected. We shall need to find ways to utilize the creative capacities of our older people if we are to avoid a serious loss of energy and morale.

## IV

It is a paradoxical fact that while we grow older, we grow younger. Twenty years ago, as a heritage of the depression, our population was relatively poor in children. Today, as a result of the dramatic upsurge of birthrates in recent years, our population distribution is again rich in children. But as with our increasing longevity, the literal rejuvenation of our people will not come as an unalloyed blessing. Indeed it will place an unprecedented strain on one of our most important and already overburdened institutions: our educational system.

For the coming of age of our crop of babies will manifest itself as a kind of human tidal wave. Already the wave has swamped our elementary

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schools, particularly in the crowded suburbs. Tomorrow it will travel on to flood our high schools. Thereafter it may drown our colleges.

A few figures will illustrate the magnitude of the problem. In 1956 elementary school enrollments stood at 30 millions, up fifty percent from 1945-46. By 1960 this number will have increased by another four millions. Meanwhile the high schools will be bracing for the coming shock. Today they are educating nearly a third more students than in the middle thirties. By 1969 they will have to raise present levels by another fifty to seventy percent.

But it is at the college level that the pressure of increased enrollments will present the most serious difficulties. The number of students in colleges and universities has roughly doubled since 1945-46, from just under 1.7 million to 3.2 million. This is not due so much to the increased birthrate (which has not yet had its impact at the college level) as to the increasing value placed on a college degree. More and more young people feel themselves unequipped for competition without a college degree, and the employment policies of a growing number of business concerns tend to bear them out. When the increasing *proportion* of young people wishing to go to college is coupled with the growing numbers of those of college age, the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent: by 1970 present enrollments in institutions of higher education will at least double and applications may even triple.

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The result of this is a two-fold *impasse*. First, by crowding our colleges we are risking a serious dilution in the content of higher education: to ask an already overburdened faculty to educate twice as many students inevitably entails a diminution in the amount of attention which can be paid to any individual student. Particularly for our more gifted young people this spells a very severe loss. Secondly, we are facing a very difficult problem of financial adjustment for the colleges themselves. For state universities at least there is the possibility of a legislative recognition of their plight, but for the private colleges -- already hard-pressed to make ends meet - the prospect of a further influx of students is simply a guarantee of larger deficits. It would be an ironic result of our enthusiasm for higher education if it led to the progressive undermining of both the level of education and the financial stability of our institutions of higher learning.

The challenge of higher enrollments would be a sufficiently difficult problem by itself, but it is made yet more critical by a second educational crisis. This is our shortage of teachers. Only a year ago the United States Office of Education estimated that the nation's schools were short 100,000 qualified teachers. And the outlook is for still graver shortages to come. The number of new school teachers needed in the coming decade is equal to about 50% of all the four year college graduates in that same period. Since only about 20% of college graduates enter teaching it would take a gigantic recruiting effort to bring our educational faculty up to full strength.

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But at the same time that the need for attracting young people into
teaching is at its greatest, the incentive to take up an educational career
is every year growing less. College salaries used to be -- and in many
other countries still are -- substantial upper middle-class incomes. It is a
stinging commentary on the esteem which we now accord to the educational
profession that automobile workers in 1953 averaged higher earnings than
assistant professors at large universities. Hence it is not only the quantity
but the quality of the educational profession which is in acute danger of
deterioration. We are in effect risking a decline in the calibre of our teaching
profession to the level at which we reward it.

V

We have thus far paid attention to concerns whose urgency can be
traced to the changing physical characteristics of our people -- to new
patterns of movement, new age groupings. Now we must pay heed to another
source of both problems and opportunities. This is the changing social and
technological environment in which we live.

For the kind of people we are depends in part upon the kinds of tasks
we are called upon to do. Thus early American life, faced with a wild and
hostile natural environment requiring immense labors to subjugate and tame,
stressed the qualities of independence, initiative, ingenuity. The pioneer
spirit, the Yankee resourcefulness, the forceful optimism of our forefathers
were not merely traits of character which developed in isolation or which were

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evidence of their moral superiority. They were essential character traits for a nation in which existence was individually sustained to a far greater degree than in more settled countries.

But by the end of the nineteenth century the texture of American life had irrevocably altered. America was now an industrial nation and the initial impact of industrialization on the national character was akin to that of a steamroller. The credo was still largely that of pioneer America, but the reality was different. For as the background of social organization changed, so did the framework into which human aspiration and achievement had to adjust itself. The emphasis on the generalized and versatile individual gave way to that of the unskilled "unit" of a mass labor force; the self-sufficiency of the New England farmer to the social dependency of the New England mill operative. The ideal of the "rugged" individual ill-accorded with the first leveling blows of mass production, Taylorism, and standardization. Indeed where industrialization exerted its most powerful thrust -- in the new phenome~ non of mass work -- the very qualities of stubborn independence and non-conformity so necessary for and characteristic of a frontier society became as much a hindrance as an asset. One need only compare the skills and the life goals of the population of Detroit in 1915 with those of a century before to visualize the change at its most drastic.

The process of change -- of the adaptation of our protean capacities to the strictures of social environment -- continues to our present day.

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For the nature of the world in which people work, and strive to better them-
selves, and adjust to the realities of life is significantly different today
from that of late nineteenth century America. In another twenty years it
may well be as different from that point of past reference as nineteenth
century America in turn differed from its pioneer antecedents. Hence an
appreciation of the social environment of the present and future is indispensable
to an understanding of the kind of people we are and can be.

***

What is the spectrum of social tasks in America today? A backward look to 1910 will highlight some of the significant changes of the past half century.

By far the largest occupational group in the nation in 1910 were its unskilled laborers. Over one American in three then performed some arduous task -- wielding his shovel, toting his load, performing his heavy chores. Today the group of the unskilled has shrunk to less than one in four and the steady decline of two of its major components -- farm labor and domestic household labor -- points to its incipient disappearance as the largest single category of occupation. Meanwhile even its remaining uses, the nature of the tasks it performs has radically altered. Heavy labor is now of almost negligible importance in providing the American motive power: less than one percent of our total useful work-evergy derives from human or animal muscle power.

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Rivalling and, since the last census, perhaps even exceeding the unskilled are the number of our semi-skilled workers -- machine tenders, assembly line men, and the like. Today a quarter of our labor force is called upon for an exercise of industrial dexterity or judgement or training which in 1910 was demanded of only one person in seven. Here is where yesterday's great pool of undifferentiated labor is being utilized in more specialized, precise, and exacting ways.

Yet what is striking is not this movement from unskilled to semi-skilled occupations. It is the fact that the total occupational migration of our working populace is out of *both* categories. As a glance at the table below reveals, we are becoming a nation of increasingly high-level skills:

Occupational Distribution of Labor Force *

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>1910</th><th>1955</th></tr><tr><th></th><th></th><th><u>percent</u></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Professional & technical workers</td><td>4.4</td><td>9.8</td></tr><tr><td>Proprietors, managers and officials, excluding farm</td><td>6.5</td><td>11.1</td></tr><tr><td>Clerical workers</td><td>10.2</td><td>14.2</td></tr><tr><td>Skilled workers and foremen</td><td><u>11.7</u></td><td><u>14.1</u></td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>32.8</td><td>49.2</td></tr></tbody></table>

* Statistics for 1910 from America's Needs and Resources, Twentieth Century Fund, N.Y. 1947, p.549. 1955 from Statistical Abstract of the U. S. 1956, p. 209. Note: 1955 figure for white labor force only. The tables are not strictly comparable, but accurately reflect orders of magnitude.

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Perhaps the primary significance of such a tableau is its refutation
of the Marxist prediction that our society would be polarized into a massive
proletariat and a highly concentrated group of capitalists, for the statistics
bear clear witness to the rapid <u>vise</u> rate of the middle strata of occupation and
status. But there is a second implication as well. We are becoming a society
in which considerable prerequisites of skill and education are essential for
our functioning -- a society in which the raw and untrained labor armies of
the past have become not only an anomaly but a handicap. Furthermore there
is every likelihood that this demand for skill and talent will accelerate
powerfully over the future.

Not least of the factors pointing to this conclusion is the automation
"revolution" whose first substantial effects will probably be felt in the
next decade. The exact degree to which self-regulating machinery will
replace human labor, for example, and the ultimate economic consequences
of this replacement, are still matters for debate. There is no debate however
over the immediate impact of automation on the level of occupational skills.
The consensus of all engineers and economists who have considered the
problem is that automation will eliminate the <u>routine</u> jobs of production and
will offset them by far more technically demanding tasks of machine super-
vision, maintenance, regulation, etc.

A second impetus toward the raising of our national demand for skill
and talent is the increasing high-level specialization of our environment.