America’s Drive to Compete Comes With Price : ‘If I just didn’t have to sleep, then I’d have time to do all the things I have to do,’ says Angela Terry, one of the first voters interviewed for a new series--Field Notes: Americans in an Election Year.

We start here because America started here. At least the statehood part of America started here. Tiny Delaware, working the angles even back then, hurried the paperwork and thus became the first state to ratify the Constitution.

We start here, too, because there is fashionable pragmatism in the grit and Eastern Seaboard haze and chemical stew and corporate parchment and formal gardens and row houses that are Wilmington, Del. A pragmatism that goes back 200 years to when French intellectual Eleuthere Irenee du Pont and two sons arrived with a dream of transforming this Quaker settlement into a utopian economic community.

Quickly, though, the du Ponts recognized the potential of gunpowder. Forget utopia, they rolled out their first barrel of DuPont No. 1 black powder in 1803. What could be more pragmatic than that?

A bang of a start that put us on the road to Nylon, Teflon, Stain Master carpet fibers and CFCs.

Finally, we start here with an ear to the ground because busy Delaware seems to be doing OK in these spiritless times. Unemployment is 4%. Household incomes are in the top 10 among states; poverty in the bottom 10.

Taxes and laws are candy-coated like flypaper to attract business. Indeed, more than half of America’s Fortune 500 corporations and some 204,750 others are chartered here, so favorable are the laws and the Court of Chancery.

So, by the terms of the current American political campaign, Delaware is sitting proud and pretty on the doorstep of the hard-charging 21st Century.

Pondering this, it becomes difficult to hear tonight’s political news on the television in the hotel lounge. Three executive-cut women have taken the next table. Their words rise and mix with the announcer’s. At first it’s a distraction, then intriguing: It seems there is more drive in what the three women are saying than in the canned speech of the candidate’s wife, who now fills the TV screen with homilies about family values.

Wouldn’t you guess, the three women are talking about family values, too. Sort of. They ignore the TV.

“Ten or 20 years ago, you know, people used to say that with technology and computers, we’d have lots of time to enjoy ourselves. Well? Exactly where is this time?” Latonya Dixon is a bank card auditor. She smiles but she is not happy.

Angela Terry is a young, upward-bound banking manager. “What’s happening is that a job that used to take five people to do is now given to three people. They’re trying to keep up, and two people are out of work. . . . If I just didn’t have to sleep, then I’d have time to do all the things I have to do, that I should do, that I want to do.”

These are challenging times, the women agree. Their careers are rising, but the hours are longer, the weekends shorter, the future more demanding, the job climate crueler. And then, there are the duties for their community, the United Way, the Brownies, precinct judging . . . on and on.

They used to get together often, these friends. But already this evening they are glancing at their watches. They’ve come a long way, baby. And they are beat. And the politicians of the 1992 campaign tell them they can look forward to working harder yet in this new global economy. Compete, compete. Come on, America, we can do it. We can produce more, faster and with fewer people on the payroll, in order that we can buy and consume more faster still.

The vinegary fruit of industrialized progress.

Barbara Sheppard, who operates a private preschool, is the third woman at the table. She also is the oldest. She notes that she did not get her career started until her children were grown. The other two women have postponed families to push on with their careers, choices imposed by intensified economic competition.

“As successful African-American women we need to spend time back in our communities, where we are role models for young people. And we don’t have enough time to do it right. . . . Like, I’m not doing Brownies this year. Some people will say, aw, who cares, it’s just Brownies. But there are little girls there who need me,” Sheppard says.

The women know instinctively the tale of the tape: A greater percentage of Americans are in the work force than in any other industrialized power. The U.S. workweek is longer than all these nations, except Japan. Indeed, the U.S. workweek is 20% longer than Germany’s. And U.S. vacations are the laughingstock of much of the industrialized world.

All three women say they would rather have more time than money. If they had the choice. If it were culturally acceptable. If they could hold their heads high and not relinquish their self-image as productive, successful Americans.

So, what of the campaign?

Eyes drop uncomfortably to wristwatches.

Other Americans might say these women should hush up and consider themselves fortunate to have good jobs.

Perhaps. These are pragmatic days, after all. And don’t forget the lesson of the du Ponts. Their gunpowder long ago blew to dust the abstract politics of men like U.S. Founding Father John Adams.

Back in 1780, before the first election of a President, Adams expressed a hope for how the new U.S.A. would mature.

His generation would study politics and war, Adams said, so that the next generation could engage in commerce and agriculture so that the next could study “painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” Just another utopian, no doubt.

Reporting on politics in the 1970s and 1980s, John Balzar traveled America with candidates and their caravans. This presidential campaign, with politics and voters still the assignment, Balzar is on his own in a Pontiac coupe. First stop: Wilmington, Del. Up next: Pittsburgh, Pa.

Impressions From Delaware

They used to get together often, these friends. But already this evening they are glancing at their watches. They’ve come a long way, baby. And they are beat. And the politicians of the 1992 campaign tell them they can look forward to working harder yet in this new global economy.