Draft Chapter II - Overall Report

November 2, 1957

# PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES AT HOME

## CHAPTER II

### SOME BASIC CONCERNS

#### I

Collectively and individually, every people must face the supreme questions of life: Who are we? How shall we live? In what shall we believe? For what may we hope? To all men everywhere these are the ultimate riddles of existence.

But all men do not answer these questions in identical ways. In the flux of life the great questions tend to be seen only as petty aggravations: wonderment becomes worry, awe turns into anxiety; aspiration is felt as ambition. And in the social context of life, men do not act as philosophers. Societies do not reflect; they react. They do not contemplate; they carry on.

And so each society comes to grips with existence in a different fashion. Each feels some aspects of life to be more important than others, more worthy of effort, more of a concern. For some peoples the concern may center on material accomplishment; for others it involves religious observance; for yet others, the pursuit of pleasure. In one society the concern may be focussed on the development of the individual, in another on the welfare of the group.

And thus in the concerns of a people we find a key to its deepest spiritual orientation to life. Concerns are what a people has selected from its life experiences as deserving of attention. And this is particularly true

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of an open society such as our own. Perhaps less than any other people we
are free to choose our own concerns, unencumbered by inherited definitions
of what life is and how it is to be lived. Such an open society, if it is to
be at all vital, must be troubled. If it did not have concerns, it would not
have a soul.

Hence an appraisal of our society at midcentury must begin not with
its achievements, but with its problems. Social achievement is a measure
of past effort, not of present worth. It leads not to concern but to content-
ment, and contentment in a society is akin to health in an individual:
grievously missed when lacking, but taken for granted when it exists. But
the problems of a society reflects its humanity. For each problem defines
a concern. If we were not concerned with the dignity of man, for example,
the integration of the Negro into American society would not present itself
as a problem and because each problem springs from a concern, it also
defines an opportunity. A nation's problems describe the kind of people who
comprise it; a nation's opportunities outline the kind of society its people
wish it to be.

II

What are some of the great concerns of America today?

Any consideration of America's problems and opportunities must
necessarily start with a close look at the people from whom the nation derives

November 2, 1957

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 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

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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 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-stricken 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,

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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.

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 in-
habitants. 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 popula-
tion, 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
<u>the</u> 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 diffi-
cult 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 center 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 classes in the suburbs has
led to a deterioration of many of our metropolitan centers, particularly of their

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residential areas. It has been estimated that in 1950 about 20% of the dwell-
ings 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 characteristics. 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, 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

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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 becomes 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
the classic avenue of economic advancement taken before the Negro by

November 2, 1957

successive waves of foreign immigrants. In many 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 discrimina-
tion 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. 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.

III

No less significant that 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.

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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, cholera -- 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 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.

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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 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 personal privation on a national

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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
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
1945-6. 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.

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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.

The challenge of higher enrollments would be a sufficiently difficult problem by itself, but it is made far 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 graduated 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. 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

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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 candidates to the level at which we reward it.

To many of these problems of education we shall return in a later chapter. But we must first see the educational problem in a still fuller perspective, for the issue which it poses is profound.

Hitherto our most brilliant educational achievement has consisted in providing universal education for an ever-increasing populace. Our concern has been that of equality -- we have turned our social idealism on the admirable aim of eliminating the disadvantages that come of a lack of access to training and knowledge. And it is this moral concern which still lies uppermost in our minds when we confront the enormous increase in the demand for education and ask, how shall we satisfy it for everyone?

But our concern with equality has often conflicted with a second and no less important aim of our society. This is the cultivation of individual excellence and achievement. Thus, our natural desire to accommodate the rising demand for a college education is leading to two grave *impasses*.

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One is an unavoidable dilution in the standards of higher education when presently inadequate facilities and teaching talents must be stretched still further. The second is that those who are best equipped to benefit from advanced study are deprived of the individual attention they need.

This dilemma of equality and excellence is not confined to our colleges alone. It is manifest in our entire educational spectrum. For in a school system where the amount and rate of learning is geared to the average, it is the ablest students who become the handicapped. One index of the resulting waste is that of the most talented 25 percent of our high school students, one half, or 200,000 each year, fail to continue their education into college--some because of lack of means, but at least as many for lack of motivation. Thus the paradox of our educational problem is that by insisting on standards of equality, we are in fact inflicting a subtle but serious inequality on ourselves; while we send on the average student to our overcrowded colleges, we may be failing to stimulate the exceptional student who should go to college. In a society which depends as critically as ours upon self-development, we cannot afford to let so much talent be wasted, much less waste away.

We have thus far paid attention to concerns whose urgency can be traced to the changing physical characteristics of our people -- to our social movement, our new age groupings. Now we must also pay heed to another source of both problems and opportunities. This is the changing 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. A nation of farmers is not like a nation of seafarers; a nation of craftsmen not like

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one of industrial workers. Hence we now survey the demands which our society makes of us as a people: the skills on which it depends, the kinds of careers which it offers.

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-energy derives from human or animal muscle power.

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 the exercise of the industrial dexterity or judgement or training which in 1910 was demanded of only one person in seven. Here is where the great pool of

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undifferentiated labor of fifty years ago 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>percent</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>11.7</td><td>14.1</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>32.8</td><td>49.2</td></tr></tbody></table>

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 rise of the middle strata of occupation and
status. But there is a second implication as well. We are becoming a society

* 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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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.

This is clearly an unprecedented opportunity for a society concerned
with individual achievement -- and it is an opportunity which can be expected
to accelerate powerfully over the near future under the impact of several factors.

Not least of these 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, 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 *routine* jobs of production and will offset them by far more technically demanding tasks of machine supervision, maintenance, regulation, etc.

A second impetus toward the opening of new opportunities is the increasing high-level specialization of our environment. It is perhaps only a commonplace to note that no scientist today can hope to encompass more than a rather small sector of his own subdivision of scientific knowledge. But an identical refinement and fragmentation of function and skill has taken place in other fields as well. Military strategy rests importantly on the advice of scholars and technical experts in matters far removed from military operations as such. The conduct of government depends heavily on the talents of the

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economist, the agronomist, the public health expert. Even the operation of
business is no longer possible without recourse to specialized assistance.
Industrial psychologists, market research specialists, tax lawyers, highly
trained accountants, personnel officers are indispensable to the successful
operation of a large corporate enterprise. Meanwhile the enormous expan-
sion and systematization of research has expanded manyfold the demand for
creative talent in virtually every field of endeavor.

It may well be that this atomization of knowledge and function do
not augur well for the depth and breadth of our life-views -- this is a matter
which we cannot now foretell. Yet the present prospect is an invigorating
one. At every level of our national life the trend is toward higher require-
ments of skill and training. Whether it be in the capacities needed to man
our industrial apparatus or in the professional skills required to staff our
social and economic institutions, or in the dependence of our natural progress
and security or creative thought, the universal fact is for an unprecedented
importance of individual effort and accomplishment. Never before have the
cultivation and utilization of our individual capacities to their utmost been
a matter of such urgent national concern.

Yet the existence of a new and richer framework of opportunities is
not in itself a matter for self-congratulation. It is only the new boundary of
possibilities. For human effort is not merely a passive response to external
stimulus. It displays its own inner thrust -- or its own fatal inertia. A
framework of opportunities is only a challenge. How we respond to it is our
problem.

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And it is by no means certain that the response will be adequate. For we are not only a more specialized, complex, exacting society. We are also a more organized, structured, bureaucratic one.

That such a bureaucratization should accompany a technically and socially more complex system is neither surprising nor in itself harmful. Delicately interdependent social mechanisms cannot exist without synchronization and order and it is the purpose of bureaucratic practice to inject continuity, dependability and orderliness into what would otherwise be an unmanageable chaos. It is as inconceivable that General Motors should be run without standard operating procedures as that the Veterans Administration should attempt to dispense with rules and categories and conduct its operations on a purely ad hoc basis.

But whereas the bureaucratic nature of modern society has its very necessary functions, it also poses severe and sometimes crippling obstacles to a society's vitality. At a certain point the administration of activity can take priority over the activity itself. At the higher levels of policy decision, it is in the typical and perhaps endemic nature of organizational life that it rejects the untried and the bold in favor of the routine and safe -- a procedure which, while useful in ninety-nine ordinary cases, may be disastrous in the hundredth.

And within the organized social machine as well, the environment of bureaucracy presents a stifling atmosphere for the exercise of personal audacity.

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In this atmosphere of regularity and order, the temptation is to conform to the habits of thought and behavior of the group and, therefore, to gear one's personal abilities to an acceptable common denominator of slow advance.

As a number of observers have commented, even in the large business organization the emphasis is not on excelling, but on "getting along" with people, becoming a member of a "team," working one's way slowly up the hierarchical ladder by the exercise of "sound judgment" and "good personality." There may be considerable benefits in terms of the smoothness of life from this organizational attitude, but it is hardly conducive to the kind of original and genuinely creative activity on which society now so importantly depends.

There is a danger that the qualities which are encouraged on the rise to the top of large organizations are not the qualities which are most useful when eminence is reached. The very smoothness of operation of bureaucratic machines in many walks of our life may tempt our most talented individuals to set their sights too low.

Thus the problem ahead is essentially that of the level of striving which is realizable in a society where the avenues of advance converge on citadels of routine. It is the problem of a society in which widening opportunities for achievement are too easily defined in terms of more competence and where the exceptional is rejected because it has no place.

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VII

And thus a consideration of some of America's basic concerns brings us finally to a philosophic issue. This is the eternal tug of war, more acute today perhaps than ever before, between two democratic ideals: that of equality on the one hand, and that of rewarding excellent performance, regardless of the performer's antecedents, on the other. William James once said, "Democracy is on trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny."

The momentum of a society which measures status by achievement -- as ours does -- derives from the emphasis it places on excellence. The result of our traditional optimism has been an orientation towards individual performance, the belief that great exertion will inevitably find its own reward.

But the reverse side is equally noticeable. Achievement may be an acceptable definition of status to the individual who has the energy, the ability or the will to succeed. It will seem much less attractive to the person who lacks these qualities. There will consequently always be a pressure to rewrite the rules of the contest, to diminish the traditional emphasis in performance as the determinant of status. We find such institutional defenses in many walks of our national life. Trade union practices and civil service

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rules governing seniority and tenure are efforts to erect defenses in favor of
average performance and to lower the emphasis on ability and exceptional
devices. The academic routine of advancing the talented and untalented alike
and the enforcement of retirement at a fixed age are now to be seen in a new
light as means of achieving equality at the expense of individual excellence.

This root dilemma of democracy resides in a paradox, brilliantly
explored by John Gardner:

"...On the one hand it (democracy) is the form of society which says most convincingly, 'Let the best man win,' and rewards winners regardless of origin. On the other hand, it is the form of society which gives losers the widest latitude in rewriting the rules of the contest. No one who has not thought long and hard about these paradoxical facts is in a position to understand the tug of war between equality and excellence in a democracy. When the rewriting of the rules is prompted by the standards of fair play, by elementary considerations of justice, by basic value judgments as to what sort of a 'best man' the society wants, democracy can have no quarrel with it. Indeed, it is the core process of a democracy. But when the rewriting of the rules is designed to banish excellence, to rule out distinguished attainment, to inhibit spirited individuals, then all who pray for the continued vitality of democracy must protest.

"Every democracy must encourage high individual performance. If it does not then it closes itself off from the mainsprings of its dynamism and

November 2, 1957

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talent and imagination; and the traditional democratic invitation to the individ-
ual to realize his full potentialities becomes meaningless. Because of the
leveling influences which are inevitable in popular government, a democracy
must, more than any other form of government, maintain what Ralph Barton
Perry has called 'an express insistence upon quality and distinction.' When
it does not do so, the consequences are all too familiar: the deterioration of
standards, the debasement of taste, shoddy education, vulgar art, cheap
politics, and the tyranny of the lowest common denominator.

"...For whatever reason, there are large numbers of individuals who will not necessarily find unrelieved exhilaration in a system that emphasizes high performance. If these large numbers come to believe that the system exposes them unnecessarily to frustration and defeat, and if they enjoy the freedom of social action characteristic of a democracy they will create elaborate institutional defenses to diminish the emphasis upon performance as a determinant of status. We can observe such institutional defenses not only in education but in every aspect of our national life.

"Such defenses -- in one form or another -- will always be with us. In their origin they are often healthy reactions to excessive or exclusive emphasis upon performance. But carried far enough these defenses too can constitute excesses and can contribute a fatal rigidity to the society."

Today, no less than a half century ago when William James uttered his
warning, the threat remains that in our emphasis on equality and our concern

November 2, 1957

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with fair play and justice and protection of the weak -- we may also be sup-
planting excellence with mediocrity, inhibiting creative and gifted individuals,
discouraging distinguished attainment, and enthroning the inferior. No more
crucial task confronts the American people today than to reconcile the con-
flict between quantity and quality, between equality and excellence, on all
levels of national existence. There is no profounder question than that which
asks how best we can distribute widely the rewards of self-esteem and self-
respect which release the energies and provide the motivations of the whole
population, and at the same time dedicating ourselves to that cultivation of
distinction and the striving for excellence which alone can produce great
achievements. "We have to defend the country against mediocrity," said
Abraham Flexner many years ago. "Against mediocrity of soul, mediocrity
of idea, mediocrity of action. We must also fight it in ourselves."