America: From Days of Rage to Fits of Gentleness

It is the kind of change that few would have predicted five years ago when, from road rage to immigrant bashing, meanness set the tone for American culture. But as the new century unfolds, what is most striking about public life is the rise of a new gentleness.

“Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when his country needs him?” a popular 1995 bumper sticker asked. Today, such a bumper sticker would be unthinkable. Like the National Football League, which has officially banned the throat-slashing gesture so many of its players used to make after scoring a touchdown, we are embarrassed by the idea of being thought a cold and ruthless society.

Nowhere is this shift more visible than in the 2000 political campaigns. After years of talking about scaling back government services for the poor, Democrats are discussing the reverse. “The question for America is, ‘How much do we care?’ ” Vice President Al Gore says in talking about the future. Using almost identical language, former Sen. Bill Bradley says, “America is great because people care about each other.”

What is most surprising, however, is that the same buzzwords are being used by Republicans, who, despite their testiness in South Carolina, keep coming back to the question of who has the most heart. In insisting that he is a Republican who can appeal beyond his party’s base, Texas Gov. George W. Bush has not only made compassionate conservatism the hallmark of his campaign, he has broken ranks with GOP congressional leaders and chastised them for trying to “balance their budget on the backs of the poor.” Arizona Sen. John McCain, who, since his stunning victory in New Hampshire demonstrated his appeal to independents, has been no less outspoken on the matter of compassion. He has offered a tax-cut program that makes the solvency of Social Security and Medicare a priority and insists that when it comes to the economy, “I am compelled by information that indicates that there’s a growing gap between haves and have-nots in America.”

Politicians are not alone in believing that the public is fed up with tough guys. The backlash against health maintenance organizations has produced a parallel softening of positions. The most dramatic step occurred last November, when United Healthcare, one of the nation’s biggest managed-care companies, announced it was returning decision-making power to doctors. Aetna/US Healthcare, HealthNet and several Blue Cross plans already opted to give their members the right to appeal denials of care to panels outside the company.

Within the insurance industry, similar change is underway. The Health Insurance Assn. of America, which successfully fought the Clinton administration’s 1993-94 health-care reforms with its Harry and Louise ads, is backing legislation to halt the increase in the number of people without medical coverage. These days, Harry and Louise insist, “We can’t leave working families and kids without insurance.”

Big business, as well, has begun to adapt to the changing social climate. Companies have been far less outspoken, compared with 1996, in their opposition to the latest proposed rise in the minimum wage. In addition, when it comes to recruiting college graduates for executive positions, they have bowed to a new mood among students. According to a recent Price Waterhouse Coopers survey, 57% of students, up from 45% in 1997, say their primary goal is “attaining a balance between personal life and career.” Business recruiters at Texas Instruments make a point of not calling prospective employees after 5 o’clock or on the weekend, and Cisco Systems has even taken an old word, “integration,” and given it new meaning: It describes the company’s commitment to blending work and personal life as seamlessly as possible.

Most visible of all has been the cultural impact of the new gentleness. In the museum world, the change can be found in the serious attention now given Norman Rockwell, who, in the 1940s and 1950s, became a beloved national figure for his Saturday Evening Post covers celebrating middle-class America. Few artists were so universally scorned by critics and curators as Rockwell. But these days, what’s creating interest in Rockwell and justifying a retrospective of his work, which will tour the country and conclude, in 2001, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is the very sentimentality that once made it possible to dismiss him as an illustrator who shut his eyes to the complex and the unpleasant.

A similar process is occurring in television. The world of hip urban singles represented by “Friends” and “Sex in the City” is still going strong, but it is being challenged by family shows. On the youth-oriented WB network, “7th Heaven,” a show about a pastor’s family that bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1950s hit “Father Knows Best,” now outdraws WB’s teen-marketed shows “Felicity” and “Dawson’s Creek.” On the three major networks, “Touched by an Angel,” “Providence” and “Judging Amy,” all featuring characters who wear their hearts on their sleeves, are also scoring big.

Most surprising is the popularity of the quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” hosted by Regis Philbin. The key to “Millionaire” is a format in which contestants are not asked to entertain with feats of brilliance but with an appealing ordinariness. Instead of being isolated in a booth, contestants are seated across from Philbin and receive three lifelines, or chances, to help them become millionaires. If a contestant doesn’t know the answer to a question, he or she can poll the audience, telephone a friend or have two of the four possible answers eliminated. Equally telling, contestants are guaranteed $32,000 once they have passed a certain level on the way to becoming a millionaire. The show’s moral, strikingly at odds with the succeed-or-fail sensibility of the old quiz shows, is that we all need a safety net.

It is difficult to imagine the new gentleness occurring without a booming economy. With gains in the Dow Jones industrial average topping 20% in four of the last five years, low inflation and a current unemployment rate of 4%, it is easy for both big business and the nation’s taxpayers to show compassion. The bad old days of downsizing, so much a part of the early 1990s, seem safely behind us.

But even more important is our sense of the toll that extremism and fanaticism have taken in recent years. On the national level, the no-holds-barred partisanship of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr brought the country to a political standstill and earned them high negative ratings. Then there is the damage inflicted by those on the political fringes. Since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, nothing has been more frightening than the resurgence of vigilantism. In Jasper, Texas, it resulted in the killing of a disabled black man, James Byrd Jr., by three whites with ties to supremacist groups; in Laramie, Wyo., the torture and murder of a gay college student, Matthew Shepard; and in Pensacola, Fla., and Amherst, N.Y., the assassination of doctors who worked at abortion clinics.

As a consequence, moderation and compromise have acquired new respectability. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell doesn’t seem weak when he reaches out to gays, despite years of gay bashing, just as Gov. George H. Ryan of Illinois, a Republican who supports capital punishment, doesn’t seem soft on crime for halting executions in his state after publication of a study showing that, since 1977, 13 Illinois death-row inmates were exonerated after their cases were reopened. Both men reflect an America in which finding common ground has come to seem an enormous improvement over finding the latest wedge issue. *