This Noble Land: My Vision for America Page 4
The United States can feed itself and much of the rest of the world using much less than 60 percent of our present farm workforce. And our manufacturing genius can, with no more than 60 percent of our present factory workers, provide all the consumer goods we need. This means that we will have a permanently unemployed mass of working men and women—a situation we’re facing right now.
The strategic problem becomes: How can we pump into the lowest 15 percent or 20 percent of our idle population enough spending money so that they can function as economic units in our complicated system? I want to place money into their hands not only to help them but also to aid the rest of us. It is imperative that the very poor remain part of our economic system, spending what money they have in our stores, but for them to play this essential role they must somehow acquire money.
For many years I have pondered this almost insoluble problem, and no reasonable solution seems practical. I lived in Great Britain in the 1930s when much of that nation was on the dole, a solution that gave the unemployed poor a cash allowance. While the dole was effective in achieving what I deem a major good—the spreading around of money that could enter the economic bloodstream in an orderly fashion—I deplored the demoralizing effect the solution had on its recipients. I knew there must be a better way, but I was unable to define it then, and even now, sixty years later, I cannot think of a better way to support the unemployed, and neither can our nation’s leaders. I would certainly regret seeing a gratis dole—that is, the indiscriminate distribution of unearned money-established in our country. But I need not worry—the general public would not allow it.
In the United States I witnessed the operation of the Works Progress Administration, under President Franklin Roosevelt, which contained too many negative aspects to be effective. A major cause of its failure was that our labor unions would not allow the government to institute serious or effective work programs lest jobs be taken away from union workers.
I was more favorably impressed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had, so far as I could see, a faultless program in which young people could do constructive work for their communities while earning a modest salary. I would have hopes for such a program, were one to be reinstituted now.
I was enthusiastic about the National Youth Administration, which encouraged young people to go to college or to remain there if already enrolled. Helping to supervise its program in Colorado, I was authorized to help as fine a group of young people as I would ever know: each receiving the munificent sum of $35 a month, they assisted our college by working in the library, policing the campus, helping the local public schools as assistant teachers or performing a wealth of other useful tasks.
It was an admirable gesture for our federal government to make, but it exacted a personal penalty. Professors at the college complained that three of my recipients were not performing well at their assigned tasks or in their studies. When I looked into the matter I found the complaints to be justified. The cause was simple. These three young scholars were sending to their impoverished parents out on the Colorado dry lands, where the Depression was cruel, half the money I gave them for their own upkeep. These admirable young people were living on $17.50 a month and were starving themselves. In some cases I made up the difference from my own pocket, for I knew that we were all in this together.
My knowledge of history warns me that if, like the medieval church, we allow great wealth to accumulate in a few hands, and if we continue to allow the rich to become richer while greater numbers of the middle class slide into near poverty and the poor grow ever more desperate, revolution of some kind will become inevitable. In the United States it may be long deferred, for we are still a rich and powerful land that can absorb some errors, but the potential for violence cannot be ignored. I am deeply worried about our unwillingness to face up to this crucial problem of how to get spending money into the hands of the lower third of our population.
Recommendations
1. We should immediately abandon our juvenile faith in the trickle-down theory, which preaches that if you structure your tax system so that a few fortunate people can grow very rich, out of the goodness of their hearts they will allow some of their wealth to trickle down to those less fortunate below. A favorite justification for such a theory is that a rising tide lifts all the boats in the bay, which is a reassuring thought unless the smallest boats have already been swamped and sunk with no possibility of being afloat again. Our government must stop passing income tax laws and other laws whose only purpose is to siphon even more wealth into the hands of those already rich while penalizing those at the lower end of the economic scale.
2. We must remind our more affluent citizens that taxes are the contribution they must make to prevent revolution from below. A major function of government is to provide a workplace in which its citizens can earn at least living wages, and then the government must tax them sensibly to pay for the social services, the police, the hospitals, the schools and the libraries and other benefits.
3. Our brightest economic minds must address themselves to the difficult technical problem of how we can best get money into the hands of the poor. I doubt that we shall see again a growing economy that can provide a place for all workers. We are faced with a body of permanent unemployables.
4. But we must also do everything possible to bring the able unemployed back into a revised form of our workforce. We must create jobs that can be performed by undereducated people.
5. I think we must also restudy the problem of our national debt, which we are told will impose a fearful burden on our grandchildren, and political leaders issue dire warnings about the destructive influence of a trillion-dollar debt. But debt is the stake a government manipulates to attain worthy ends. For example, in the crucial years of the 1500s, when the Spanish Armada threatened to destroy England, the difference between France and England was that the former was fiscally conservative and refused to add to its debt to keep up with England, while the latter incurred enormous debt to build a war fleet, to send explorers and settlers to the new worlds being discovered and to develop the industries and banking systems that would support the great adventures. Improperly handled, debt can lead to disaster and the devaluation of currency. But properly managed, it ensures future growth and achievement. I am in favor of a reasonable debt and would not agree that present-day operations be strangled to achieve a pleasant-sounding ‘reduction of the debt to zero.’ The values that accrue to that philosophy are apt to prove illusory.
No aspect of our society causes me greater apprehension than the lamentable state of our race relations. I sorrowfully predict that racial tensions in our nation will erupt into violent racial strife in the near future. We have failed miserably to address these tensions, and now appear to be planning to continue the downward trend by cutting back on the already all too meager resources needed to ameliorate the conditions that have led to interracial stress.
Let me make my personal attitudes on race clear right now. I was married to a wonderful Japanese woman, born in this country of parents born and reared in Japan who had emigrated here for a better life. In forty years of married life my wife and I never encountered racial hostility, but I sometimes thought it was because I was a writer and was therefore held to different standards by others. In my books I have written at length and favorably about people of all races. I have done so because I truly believe that all men are brothers and that all races can contribute to a classless, color-blind society. Although I am critical of some of the traits and attitudes that I have recognized as being unfortunately characteristic of some of the minority groups in our society who have often led difficult lives, I do not think I can be accused of racial intolerance.
My professional life has obligated me to study intimately five of our minorities: the Hispanics, the Jews, the Native Americans, the Asians and, above all, the African Americans. The relationship between the Caucasian majority of our population and the Asian and Jewish minorities has been firmly defined; each group knows
where it stands in relationship to the other, and for the most part a certain harmony prevails. Our nation’s response to the growing percentages of Hispanics in our society, particularly in border areas and in other areas of high concentrations such as New York and Miami, is sometimes muddled, and we are badly confused as to what the relationship should be between our Native American minority and the Caucasian majority. Many sober students of this imbalance argue that Native Americans thrive best on the reservations that have in general been financially supported by the government. But others, like myself, believe that they do best when they are thrust into the mainstream of American life.
But the greater problem our society faces is the relationship between our African American minority and the Caucasian majority, and this problem has not begun to be solved. The longer we allow it to remain unresolved, the greater danger we face of racial violence.
Even as I drafted this chapter, additional proof surfaced of the persistence of hatred between the races in American life. The federal government announced that a total of thirty-two black Christian churches in the South had been burned. Some people who wish our black citizens ill claim that blacks themselves set the fires. There was a partial verification of this charge when police in a southern town arrested two black men accused of torching and destroying a black church. Others have argued that the acts were not antiblack but anti-Christian, proved by the fact that several of the burned churches had predominantly white congregations. Any tortured reasoning that attempts to explain away the racism simply makes this ugly epidemic more painful.
Just a sampling of statistics shows the dreadful socioeconomic imbalances between the races. Some of the data below come from reports on the 1990 Census, others of sometimes more penetrating quality from the current Bureau of the Census population surveys and the Bureau of Justice statistics. I shall intersperse these sources with data from stories in the media and studies by nonprofit research and advocacy organizations.
Income: The median income of white males in 1993 was $21,981; of black males, $14,605. In 1993 the median income of white families was $39,300; of black families, $21,542.
Affluence: According to data from the 1993 Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, of the top 5.7 percent of all U.S. households in 1993—those with an annual income of $100,000 or more—92 percent were white and only 3.7 percent were black.
Poverty: Census data in 1993 also show that only 12.2 percent of the white population existed below the poverty level; of blacks, 33.1 percent. And 9.4 percent of white families but 31.3 percent of black families lived in poverty. The income level for poverty varies by family size; the poverty threshold of a typical family of four, for example, was $14,763 per year in 1993.
Employment: The employment data are even more divisive than the income data for the crucial group of young males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine; 8.1 percent of whites were unemployed in 1994, as opposed to 18.1 percent of blacks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Babies: According to government statistics, 3.6 percent of white teenage girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen had babies out of wedlock in 1994, but among the black girls it was 10.1 percent. Of all the births to unmarried teens in this age group a year earlier, in 1993, 17.8 percent of the whites but 31.6 percent of the blacks had had at least one previous child. Another statistic is even more disturbing for both races: in 1994, 67.6 percent of the babies born to white teenagers aged fifteen to nineteen and 95.3 percent of babies born to black teenagers in the same age range had unmarried mothers.
Criminal behavior and imprisonment: One statistic is interesting because its shocking implications have resulted in much citing of it and moralizing; I myself was guilty of circulating the statement that more black males are in U.S. prisons and jails than are in U.S. colleges. The statement is true but misleading because it includes all black males, even those beyond the normal age for college, according to a Bureau of Justice statistician. When the data are restricted to the age range of eighteen to twenty-four, according to that statistician,
In 1992 there were about 149,000 black men, ages eighteen to twenty-four, in local jails, state prisons or federal prisons. That same year, there were approximately 356,000 black males, eighteen to twenty-four, enrolled in colleges in the U.S.
Nevertheless, a recent study by a nonprofit group in Washington that supports alternatives to imprisonment says that nearly one in three black men in their twenties is imprisoned or on probation or parole. According to this report, 32.2 percent of all black men aged twenty to twenty-nine are under some form of supervision by the criminal justice system. Some scholars expect this figure to rise in the next few years.
Fatalities: There is another related statistic that admits of no argument, the National Center for Health Statistics’ 1992 report on mortality rates: homicide is the leading cause of death among black males aged fifteen to twenty-four.
All of these figures add up to a devastating condemnation of the conditions under which our black minority, particularly our black men, live in the United States. Decisive national action must be taken to improve the lives of our black minority, both because it is the right thing to do and because it will be necessary if we are to avoid national strife.
Now, I can hear the well-to-do white businessman saying, ‘Many other groups in American history have experienced difficult circumstances and certainly no help was extended to them, but they improved their lives nevertheless. Why should blacks be treated any differently?’
I once made a study of how the Irish immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century adjusted to life in a variety of conservative New England towns. Statistics proved that the Irish initially had been treated just as harshly as the blacks. Political warfare exploded, and again and again the first Irishmen to achieve political office went to jail for theft of public funds or other abuses. Often, I judged, they had been railroaded by their Anglo-Saxon opponents.
When I asked a notable Irish politician to explain how the Irish had broken free, he laughed: ‘We Irish had a trick up our sleeves. Still do. We produced a steady supply of handsome young men who could play football, and just as many beautiful girls who would grace any salon. The Irish boys went to Harvard and Yale, where they played on the teams and married their teammates’ Protestant sisters. At the same time the Irish football heroes introduced their teammates to their beautiful Irish sisters. In time this produced a heady mix out of which grew Irish political freedom and power.’ He then added a caveat that has affected my thinking: ‘The tremendous advantage, however, that we Irish had over the blacks was that we were white. Our children could mix in without being visibly stigmatized. The black stands out inescapably and he cannot lose himself in the mass. I would not like to be a black. Being Irish was bad enough.’
Because of my experiences with the Irish of New England, I have often told groups of young blacks I’ve met with in schools or assemblies: ‘I’d love to be a teenaged black boy with intellectual gifts or athletic skills. Believe me, I would play this white society like a violin. Everybody would want to be my friend. Doors would be opened. Colleges and universities would seek me out and shower scholarships on me. And when I finished graduate school in law or business or science, businesses would be fighting to employ me. I’d be much more valuable to them than the ordinary white young man.’
I still believe this without question. America would be hungry to get such a young black man, but then I have to admit the folly of the fantasy. A black boy would still be black with all the impediments that that involves in American life. He could not, like the Irish boys in New England, mask his color. He might play football for Harvard or Yale, but his white teammates still might not take him into their homes during vacations or introduce their sisters to him.
The uninformed attitude that blacks should simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps is clear in that oft-repeated complaint: ‘Why don’t those big black guys on food stamps and unemployment handouts get themselves
jobs and go to work?’ The complainer fails to realize that we are all to blame for having structured our society in ways that make it extremely difficult for the uneducated young black man to find a job. Much of the factory work that he used to do for a reasonable salary is now being done down in Mexico or in Taiwan or Korea. There are, simply but tragically, too few jobs for the young African American male trying to make his way in the world.
White privileged society contributes to the problems of the black community by the cruel practice of redlining, whereby bankers refuse to lend money to businesses in black areas because the risk of theft, riots and fire is too great. Redlining is a cruel procedure that condemns a district to destructive deterioration. In the bigger cities the hardworking Koreans move in to provide the required services while incurring the hatred of the African Americans they are serving. Ghettoization is a horrible way to organize a city, but I conclude that it has been willfully orchestrated by whites who refuse to see that the nation must take responsibility for improving the conditions in which much of our black minority lives. We cannot, as so many would like to do, wash our hands of them.
Too few realize that the results of ghettoization are destructive not only to those within the ghettos but also to those without. I live in Austin, Texas, the state capital and one of the fine smaller cities in the United States. It has a university of nearly fifty thousand students on campus, a vibrant social, political and cultural life and a surprising mix of whites, blacks, Hispanics and a huge number of students from foreign lands. (Sometimes at the university when classes change and students fill the corridors it looks like an Asian university.)
The city is divided east and west by a north-south double-deck superhighway, I-35, on which traffic is constant, noisy and smelly. West Austin contains many of the finest houses in the state, but Austin east of the highway has many characteristics of a ghetto. It’s an exciting area, but residents in West Austin rarely venture eastward beyond I-35. Because I know I might want one day to write about Austin, a city I have grown to cherish, I have spent many afternoons probing the sectors: south, where the Hispanics center; northwest, where the big houses are; southwest, with moderate housing; and northeast, where the African Americans live. At the city’s center are the state capitol, the university and the homes of many of the descendants of the early European settlers who played such a large role in Austin history. This geographic description is something of an oversimplification, but it does roughly represent the differences throughout the city.