American Values at the Crossroads

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.... The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Former President Jimmy Carter

President Carter's words, delivered in a televised address to the nation in July 1979, were perhaps the gloomiest statement about the American spirit ever made by a President to the American people. Many observers felt that Carter had greatly exaggerated the decline of the American spirit. Many others, however, had been reporting a decline in the faith of Americans in their future, in their institutions, and even in many of their values since the 1960s.

The Challenge to American Values

Surely, Americans had experienced a number of things which had caused them to be more doubtful about the strength of their nation and its basic values. A popular President, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in 1963. After his death, the nation under President Johnson vastly increased the number of American troops in the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam. Johnson did this in order to prevent the Vietnamese communists from taking control of the country. He believed that communism would spread throughout Southeast Asia if it succeeded in Vietnam. By 1966, the struggle in Vietnam had become a major American war.

Most Americans agreed with the action. But even so, there was stronger opposition to the Vietnam War than to any previous American war in the twentieth century. Most of the opponents of the war attacked it as immoral. They believed it was immoral for the United States to try to determine the future of a distant country by means of war. Many opponents of the Vietnam war also attacked the nation's basic values as corrupt. Some of the harshest criticism of the United States and its values by American citizens was heard during this period of protest against the war.

While most Americans strongly rejected this harsh criticism of their nation's values, some observers believe that the anti-war movement made many Americans who supported the war more doubtful about their beliefs. An even greater blow to the majority who supported the war was the fact that the United States failed in its objective. The purpose of the war was to protect an ally of the United,, States, South Vietnam, against defeat at the hands of the communist North Vietnam. More than half a million American soldiers were sent to achieve this purpose, but this was not enough. Rather than send even more soldiers to Vietnam or take the dangerous step of using nuclear weapons, the United States began to bring its soldiers home in 1969.

In 1975 North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam. The result was discourag­ing to all Americans. The opponents of the war continued to feel that the nation had done something terribly immoral. The people who had supported the war were discouraged by its outcome. Most Americans had been brought up believing that the United States had never lost a war. Now it seemed that for the first time, this had happened. Was the nation losing its strength? If it was, was this because it was losing faith in its basic values? These were the kinds of troubling questions Vietnam raised in the minds of many Americans.

Before the Vietnam War was ended, the Watergate scandals involving the next President, Richard Nixon, dealt a second major blow to the confidence Americans had in their nation and its values. Because the President of the United States is supposed to be an outstanding example of the nation's values, the scandals tended to weaken the faith of many Americans in these values. President Nixon was forced to resign from office in 1974. Three aspects of the affair made it the most serious scandal in American history. First, illegal sabotage and -espionage activities on a large scale were carried out by agents and associates of the President against his leading political opponents in the United States. Men paid by President Nixon's reelection committee were arrested for breaking into the national headquarters of the opposition Democratic party (in the Watergate building) in order to place illegal listening devices on the telephones and to photograph party documents. Second, the President used all the powers of his office to keep law enforcement officials from finding out the truth about these activities. Third, he repeatedly lied to the American people, claiming to be innocent of all wrongdoing even after the American people had ceased to believe him.

Before the Watergate scandal, American Presidents, even unpopular ones, were thought to be basically honest, law-abiding men. President Nixon's conduct in office weakened the faith and respect Americans held for their presidents. Faith in American values was also weakened because of the belief that the President is the nation's first citizen and the most important defender of its values. "If you can't trust the President, who can you trust?" was the question on the minds of many.

The failure of the Vietnam War effort and the resignation of President Nixon in disgrace did not destroy the faith of Americans in their values, but the faith seems to have been weakened by these events. After Vietnam and Watergate, a third development appeared, which threatened to weaken the faith even further. This was the possibility that for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s the standard of living of the American people might decline significantly. As noted in Chapter 5, the material abundance of the United States has served as a kind of sustaining food which has kept American values alive and strong. Americans have considered their high standard of living a reward for practicing their basic beliefs in individual freedom, competition, and other values. The possibility of a significant decline in living standards during the 1980s and beyond, therefore, could present a danger to the continuing strength of these values.

In the late 1970s Americans became aware that the era of cheap and abundant energy was ending. In the 1980s Americans also began to discover that the nation's water supplies were declining at a rapid rate and that the amount of land available for farming was also declining as more and more farmland was changed into business and residential neighborhoods. These and other facts pointed to a decline in the foundations of material abundance that the United States had enjoyed throughout its history.

Political events such as Vietnam and Watergate, and probably even more important, the fear that the nation's material abundance may be declining, seem to have made Americans less optimistic about the future of their country. Two experts on American public opinion, Daniel Yankelovich and Bernard Lefkowitz, came to this conclusion after studying the results of American public opinion polls dating back to the 1950s. They observed that during the decade of the 1970s a significant change had taken place "from an optimistic faith in an open unlimited future to a fear of instability and a new sense of limits."*

Because the optimism and continuing abundance which had characterized the United States appeared to be less certain by the end of the 1970s, the basic American values which have been strengthened by them may have reached a crossroads in the 1980s.

A Return to the Past

Faced with rapid change and the fear and uncertainty that go with it, individuals as well as nations sometimes seek to return to the ways of the past as a solution. In the early 1980s the idea of returning to the ways of the past had a strong appeal to many Americans who increasingly viewed their past as being better than their future. Yankelovich and Lefkowitz have observed that until the 1970s Americans generally believed that the present was a better time for their country than the past and that the future would be better than the present; by 1978, however, public opinion polls showed that many Americans had come to believe that just the opposite was true: the past had been better for the country than the present, and the present was better than the future would be.

The popular appeal of returning to the ways of the past as a solution to the problems of the 1980s was demonstrated when Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980. Time magazine chose President Reagan as its "man of the year" and said of him: "intellectually, emotionally, Reagan lives in the past."

One of President Reagan's basic beliefs is that the United States should return as much as possible to its pre-1930 ways. In those times business institutions were strong and government institutions were weak. Reagan believes that the American values of individual freedom and competition are strengthened by business and weakened by government. Therefore, his programs as President have been designed to greatly strengthen business and reduce the size and power of the national government. By moving in this way toward the practices of the past, President Reagan believed that the standard of living of Americans would begin to improve once more in the 1980s as it had done throughout most of the nation's history.

The Need for New National Values

A number of leaders in politics, education, and the professions take a different approach than does President Reagan. They believe that the nation must adopt new values to go along with the old values and that it must be prepared to make some changes in the old values when necessary.

What new values should be adopted? This is a very difficult question to answer. However, it became clear in the 1970s that there was no longer an abundance of cheap energy and that shortages of other essential resources such as water were becoming more serious. These facts suggested to many Americans that a greater value be placed on the conservation of natural resources, that is, that Americans should save more of these resources by learning to use less and waste less.

Conservation has never been a strong American value. Because of the vast resources and space of North America, Americans came to believe that abundance was endless. In such an environment, there seemed to be little need for conservation of resources. After World War II Americans believed that their modern technology could work wonders and provide a never-ending increase in their standard of living. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the United States before the 1980s, conservation had little importance compared with such other values as freedom, equality of opportunity, hard work, and the accumulation of material wealth.'

There is some evidence that the experience of greater shortages of energy during the 1970s caused Americans to place more emphasis on conservation. For example, a poll taken at the end of the decade showed that 66 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: "I'm not that unhappy about the possibility of shortages because I know it will encourage me to use everything efficiently and not wastefully."*

Yankelovich and Lefkowitz, however, believe that poll results like these reveal only part of the truth. Although Americans may agree with statements supporting the value of conservation, most of them are not yet applying these beliefs in their day-to-day actions.

Belief in conservation, therefore, is still weak compared with other American beliefs. It can become stronger only as Americans see the need for it more and more clearly. Conservation may well be a new value which needs to be added to the old basic values in order to help the US deal with its future problems.

A second belief which has never been strong among the American people is a belief in the value of cooperation on a national scale to achieve some important national objectives. The American idea of the national good has never been based on national cooperation but rather on the freedom of the individual. Americans, therefore, tend to think of the national good in terms of maintaining those conditions that provide the greatest freedom for the individual. They believe that a nation of free individuals will be naturally strong and prosperous. Planned efforts at national cooperation, therefore, are not needed. More important, planned efforts at national cooperation would mean increasing the powers of the national government, which would endanger the freedom of the individual.

The American value of competition also hinders the development of a spirit of national cooperation. This ideal often encourages Americans to work against each other. Even though competitive activity is supposed to be conducted according to fair rules, it does not encourage a spirit of cooperation. Rather, it sometimes encourages a spirit of mutual suspicion of the motives of others. A certain degree of trust in the motives of others is necessary for the success of efforts in national cooperation.

In time of war Americans have temporarily put aside their dislike of planned national cooperation. They have been willing to cooperate and make personal sacrifices under the direction of the national government to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion. In peacetime, however, planned national cooperation is strongly resisted as a threat to individual freedom.

The almost unique American historical experience gives us a deeper understanding of this attitude. Almost every nation in the world has had, or still has, the experience of being ruled by kings, emperors, dictators, or a hereditary class of aristocrats. Such rulers are not elected by the free votes of the people and they have the power to say what the national good is and to force their people to cooperate if they cannot persuade them to do so. Out of these experiences there have developed traditions and habits of cooperation, sometimes for good purposes and sometimes for evil purposes.

Americans have never had the experience of being forced to cooperate on a national scale by nonelected rulers. For a time, they were the colonists of Great Britain and were legally bound to obey rulers in England whom they did not elect, but the British government allowed the colonists a great deal of freedom and self-government by the standards of the day. Still the American colonists were not long in demanding more freedom and self-government, and finally declaring their independence in 1776. From the time of their independence, Americans have freely elected their rulers. The experience of being compelled to cooperate by unelected national leaders is completely foreign to their experience. They are fearful that any scheme of national cooperation in peacetime will weaken or destroy their freedoms.

Americans have always viewed cooperation as important in small groups such as the family, the neighborhood, or the church. But on the large national scale where government becomes involved, it is seen as coercive, and destructive rather than voluntary and constructive. Americans tend to associate the greatness of their nation far more with such values as individual freedom, equality of opportunity, hard work, and competition than with national cooperation.

Yet the demands of the 1980s may compel Americans to place a greater value on national cooperation. It may well be that some of the problems facing them, such as scarcity of resources and the dangers of air and water pollution, cannot be solved without a greater degree of national cooperation.

What of the Future?

If Americans choose to give more emphasis to national cooperation, they will probably be very cautious about it. In order to protect their freedoms, they will move slowly in a step-by-step, problem-by-problem fashion, rather than accept a sweeping new plan involving dramatic change. Because of their tradition of self-government, they will probably insist on a good deal of public discussion before any single step toward national cooperation is taken.

Some observers believe that this slow, cautious approach may be too weak and too timid to meet the challenges of the future. Americans, however, believe that sudden revolutionary changes made in the name of the national good usually result in dictatorships in which freedom is lost and problems remain unsolved.

In the 1980s Americans may have arrived at a critical point in their nation's history, where major dangers must be faced and major choices must be made. On the one hand, they will wish to avoid the risk of making too many changes in the basic values which have inspired them in the past. On the other hand, they must avoid what may be the greater risk of refusing to change their values at all even though conditions are changing rapidly all around them. The events of the past two decades have brought the American people and their basic values to a crossroads in their history. The last two decades of the twentieth century will determine where they will go from there.