Demeaning Our Own Values : Liberty Fete Shows Us Speeding Back Toward a Class Society

Monday morning I was awakened by a call from my private geological laboratory located beneath the soil of Harvard Stadium in nearby Cambridge. The previous night a series of slight but measurable seismic disturbances had been detected from places as widely scattered as Mount Vernon, Monticello and Hyde Park. After long moments of puzzled reflection, I impulsively rushed to my video recorder, around which were heaped the treasured tapes of Liberty Weekend. My instincts had been unerring. The subsoil dislocations had occurred at the precise moment when Peter Jennings, reading for ABC, had proclaimed that the Founding Fathers--although lacking the vision to imagine such a glorious celebration of their work--certainly would have encouraged it. It was that bit of meretricious folly that had sent the spirits of past heroes into the swift rotation that my sensitive instruments had recorded.

It was one thing to conduct a “celebration” designed to degrade the values, the very meaning, of the country they had labored to create and restore. That could be borne in the tolerant tranquility of the grave. But to give it their imprimatur pierced even the adamantine veil of death, rousing them to the only protest possible to departed souls.

It had its moments: Manhattan inflamed, the President, the ships. But the shabby vanity of the show demeaned, and ultimately denied the very truth it was supposed to assert--the greatness and promise of America.

It was the affluent celebrating affluence. Mediocrity celebrating itself.

The Founding Fathers were not given to such self-glorification. Resigning his commission after Yorktown, George Washington wrote, “ . . . if (our) citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.”

Today’s reality is that growing millions of Americans are being diminished. And the fault is entirely our own.

We are accelerating toward the very kind of society against which we revolted--a society of economic classes, divided by formidable barriers.

The reality omitted from Liberty Weekend is recounted in the unglamorous language of numbers. But those numbers, the widening gulf between economic classes, are compounded by millions of families struggling to maintain a decent way of life, to avoid the degradations of poverty.

In 1947 we began to collect statistics on the distribution of income. Today the gap between upper- and lower-income families is wider than at any time since that date. In 1984, the latest numbers we have, 40% of all American families received only 15.7% of the national income; the middle 20% received only 17%. These are all-time records, accompanied by still another all-time first--the top 40% accumulated more than 67% of the national income.

And the movement toward inequality is accelerating. From 1980 to 1984, $25 billion of income was transferred from poor and middle-income families to those in the richest fifth of the population.

The growth of poverty is an obvious betrayal of American values. But that familiar horror is less ominous than the fact that most of those being hurt are working Americans, members of the vast middle class who are the sinews of the country’s strength and a source of our hope for the future. The rich are getting richer, and not just the poor but the rest of us are getting poorer.

If this other America--this declining nation within a nation--is virtually unseen, rarely heard, it is because those who occupy the centers of influence and communication--New York and Chicago and Los Angeles--are surrounded by those who are doing well. Their perceptions are imposed, through all the machinery of entertainment, on the rest of us, creating a national illusion that distress and discontent exist in isolated and dwindling pockets of despair and struggle.

But an illusion so counter to reality, no matter how powerfully reinforced, cannot be maintained forever. In the 1930s, with the economies of the West in shambles, discontent took two directions. In America it was the New Deal. In Central Europe the movement was to the right. Deprivation and insecurity are not ideological. They are human conditions, which are powerfully attracted to those who seem to promise resolution.

The growth of the religious right in America--the Falwells and Robertsons--is a direct consequence of discontent and sensed injustice. Their constituents are not the wealthy, but farmers and mill workers--all those whose toil is receiving a steadily diminished reward.

The shrill invocations of God and flag are yet another sign of the hunger for dignity and respect among those who are barred from the ranks of the affluent. And what choice is there? Where else is there to turn? Nowhere. Not as long as the enlightened left is in the pockets of the privileged.

We need a Huey Long-type out of a progressive Wisconsin, leadership willing to proclaim the truth and offer the severe measures that will be needed to return this country toward the oldest of its ideals--equality of opportunity and justice of reward. Otherwise the next generation of Americans will experience the truth of poet Robinson Jeffers’ prophecy:

And you America, that passion made you . . . You were

Not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.

The states of the next age will no doubt remember

You, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury.