Though still an affluent people in the last decades of the twentieth century, Americans worried if their future would be as prosperous as their post-World War II past. The accelerating pace of technological change unsettled traditional ways of work and traditional ways of life. Powerful new international competitors challenged the United States for supremacy in world markets and even in the domestic American market. Goods like automobiles and television sets that had once been "Made in the U.S.A." were crowded from showrooms and shops by imports. Economic changes and the prospect of stagnant or slowed economic growth carried far-reaching implications for American society. Women, who had been among the chief beneficiaries of the explosive economic boom of the postwar years, continued to debate their changing status in both home and workplace. Thanks largely to women's new employment patterns, the American family was evolving in ways that would have been unrecognizable--perhaps even unthinkable--just a generation or two earlier. The growing number of elderly people in American society led many observers to speculate on a looming intergenerational war over the financing of services like education and health care. African-Americans, who had made dramatic gains in the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, watched anxiously as the affirmative-action programs launched in the civil-rights era came under increasingly heated attack. Record numbers of new immigrants flooded into the United States. Meanwhile, the Cold War, which had shaped all aspects of American life for more than four decades following World War II, ended at last.

Fortune Magazine Sees a Future of Abundance (1987)
Despite the economic stagnation of the 1970s and the underpowered, though long-lived, economic recovery of the 1980s, Americans were still astonishingly wealthy as the twentieth century entered its final decade. Gains in money income improved the lives of millions of people, and social programs lifted the standard of living of millions more, notably the poor and the elderly, to new heights. Yet problems remained: stubborn pockets of poverty among the inner-city "underclass," the skyrocketing cost of housing in many areas, and the wildly accelerating price of medical care, to which some of the poorest Americans had virtually no access at all. Even members of the affluent middle class worried that their children might not be able to sustain the standard of living to which they had been accustomed. What changes in the late-twentieth-century economy does the following article identify as the most welcome? What are the most troubling? Which social groups have experienced the most dramatic changes? What role does productivity play in economic growth? How do people's expectations affect their sense of well-being?

We suspect the grass was greener. Life sweeter. The breaks better in the golden age after World War II, when the postwar boom was on and our parents were young. But as Jackie Gleason said, "The past remembers better than it lived."

It does. The average American has never had it so good. By almost any measure of health and wealth, if not wisdom, we are demonstrably better off now than in the palmy Fifties and Sixties. And that goes for just about any group you would care to name: the middle class, the poor, baby-boomers, old people, black people, women.

In some respects, despite oil shocks, recessions, and higher inflation, the gains in the Seventies and Eighties came as fast as or faster than in the two preceding decades. Our incomes are up, and so was our net worth even before the bull market turned into a stampede. We have more opportunity--to go to college, land a good job, start a business. We can choose among more things to buy, and more important, we have more choices about how we live. Arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, inequality has diminished. In the land that stands for opportunity, we are less prisoners of economic class than we ever were before.

Okay, you ask, if our purses are heavier, why aren't our hearts lighter? According to pollster Louis Harris, fewer Americans were satisfied with their economic circumstances in 1986 than in 1956. And fewer said that they were happy. One reason is that pay has been rising more slowly than during the boom times of the Sixties. Another is that higher incomes have often come at a price: More wives are working. We are also bruised from the epic battles of the Eighties--the battle with double-digit inflation, won at the price of deep recession, and the battle to make American industry more efficient and competitive, which is still producing casualties and anxiety.

In addition, we are victims of our expectations. "Kids nowadays want more than we did when we were their age," says Burdette Jenks, 65, a retired Pacific Gas & Electric troubleshooter who lives in Woodland, California. "Like a home of their own and all the latest things. They're impatient. TV was out four or five years before we bought it."

Finally, in case you might have forgotten, money does not necessarily buy happiness.

If we look back two to three decades without nostalgia, we can see striking differences in how we live. To show trends clearly, comparisons with the past in this story are generally made in dollars of equal purchasing power, adjusted for intervening inflation.

Yearly Pay Then and Now

Earnings in 1986 dollars

G.M.'s chief executive

1956 $2,641,000

1986 $1,425,000

All Fortune 500 CEOs

1956 $402,110*

1986 $931,800

A.T.&T. middle manager

1956 $30,350

1986 $41,000

Average plant manager

1956 $75,880

1986 $65,000

School teacher

1956 $15,940

1986 $25,450

Gov't worker (state or local)

1956 $15,210

1986 $25,830

Private secretary

1956 $16,390

1986 $23,190

Service worker

1956 $12,780

1986 $17,643

Steel worker

1956 $20,530

1986 $31,360

Factory worker

1956 $15,560

1986 $20,600

All employees

1956 $16,000

1986 $19,750

*Fortune estimate

(Chart by Joe Lertola)

Prices have nearly quadrupled, and taxes have been taking a bigger bite since the Fifties, but the average American commands twice as much buying power today as in 1952. And per capita income after taxes has been rising in recent years--by a third since 1970, and by a tenth just since 1980. The rate of growth since 1970 is only about half the Sixties' pace, but it matches that of the Fifties.

The typical American family's income before taxes, as measured by the Census Bureau, was half again as high in 1986 as in 1960, $29,458 vs. $19,500. All types of families got richer. Compared with their counterparts in 1960, households headed by young adults in their late 20s and early 30s--the baby-boomers whose scramble to find their places in a crowded job market has inspired so much hand-wringing--earn 25% more. For women who are raising families single-handedly, the increase is 33%. Couples with two paychecks, not surprisingly, are doing best: Their incomes are up 60%. But even when the wife stays home, the sole breadwinner brings back 34% more.

The census numbers understate the rise in living standards. Families are smaller now than they were in 1960, so they have more dollars to spend on fewer folks. The mix of families has shifted since the early Seventies toward households headed by young adults and old people, who typically have lower incomes than the middle-aged. The change depressed the average. Also missing are significant gains in noncash income, which the Census Bureau doesn't count. Employee benefits like health insurance and pension funds are twice as large a share of total compensation as they were 35 years ago.

What does a 50% improvement in family incomes mean to us? According to a recent Roper poll, most Americans believe it takes an average family $20,000 to make ends meet, $30,000 to live moderately well, and $50,000 to achieve the American dream. By these yardsticks the typical family was barely getting by in the golden past but now lives in reasonable comfort. And one in five families now, vs. fewer than one in 20 then, have made the dream come true.

But wait, cry some economists, these aggregate numbers hide a widening cleavage between rich and poor. And indeed, census data suggest as much. Between 1960 and 1986, the share of total income earned by the top two-fifths of families grew, while everybody else's share declined. But the shifts have been slight. Income distribution is still about the same as it was at the end of World War II. . . .

What Work Buys

Average hourly

wage in 1986 dollars

(nonfarm workers)

1956 $6.80

1986 $8.80

Percent 30%

change

Work time required to buy:

Kitchen range

1956 125.1 Hrs.

1986 41.4 Hrs.

Percent -67%

change

Man's suit

1956 67 Hrs.

1986 30 Hrs.

Percent -55%

change

Vist to doctor

1956 2.3 Hrs.

1986 3 Hrs.

Percent -30%

change

Car tune-up

1956 10.4 Hrs.

1986 9.2 Hrs.

Percent -11%

change

Car insurance

1956 33.6 Hrs.

1986 50.3 Hrs.

Percent 50%

change

Gallon of paint

1956 3.6 Hrs.

1986 2.4 Hrs.

Percent -33%

change

Six-pack of beer

1956 39 Min.

1986 21 Min.

Percent -46%

change

Movie ticket

1956 27 Min.

1986 29 Min.

Percent 7%

change

Chicken (fryer)

1956 15 Min.

1986 6 Min.

Percent -64%

change

Dry cleaning (1 dress)

1956 15 Min.

1986 6 Min.

Percent -11%

change

Man's haircut

1956 46 Min.

1986 39 Min.

Percent -11%

change

(Chart by Joe Lertola)

And what of the poor? The official poverty rate stopped falling in the early Seventies and rose in the early Eighties. The rate has since declined to nearly its 1980 level. But income used to calculate the rate does not include government housing subsidies and food stamps. Count these as income and only one in ten Americans is poor today, vs. one in five in 1960. More important, . . . less than 2% of Americans are permanently poor.

The great cloud in this otherwise sunny picture: The improvement in living standards since the early Seventies has come less from working smarter and more from working harder. We're also postponing or doing without many things that used to be considered essential parts of the good life: We are marrying later, having children later, and having fewer of them. Whether we're happy with these choices or not--visions of the good life change over the years--they are undeniably trade-offs. Says Brandon Balthazar, a recruiter for the Prudential in Newark, New Jersey: "At my age my parents had a kid, a house, commitments. I never thought I'd be 31 and not have kids. It surprised me." . . .

In some ways American well-being has increased much faster than plain buying power. The first wealth, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, is health. We can expect to live five years longer than we would in 1960. Infant mortality, which plateaued during the Sixties, fell by one-half during the Seventies and Eighties. Fewer adults die of heart disease or in accidents on the road or on the job. Whites live longer than blacks on average, but the gap in life expectancy, six years, is two years smaller than it was in 1960.

Income and Wealth

Average household wealth

in 1986 dollars

--------

Top 10%

1963 $832,190

1983 $977,350

Percent 17%

change

Bottom 90%

1963 $33,410

1983 $51,120

Percent 53%

change

(Chart by Joe Lertola)

Some Americans who are living longer are merely vegetating in nursing homes--more is not always better. There are new diseases, of which AIDS is the most devastating. The U.S. has long trailed the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland in infant mortality rates and longevity; recently it has been surpassed by several others, including West Germany, Japan, and Spain. But blame the Statue of Liberty in part. Those countries don't admit waves of immigrants, many of whom arrive impoverished, malnourished, and with short life expectancies. On the whole, by Emerson's yardstick, Americans are richer now than ever before. . . .

Nothing contributes more to middle-class malaise than signs that the staples of the good life--a new car, a house, a college education--are being priced out of reach. "You have to work harder and longer to get the same stuff," says Janet Kramer, 34, an executive secretary in New York City. "My mother-in-law was always telling me about the $1 deposit they put down for their first house." Indeed, when you look at prices without adjusting for inflation, the comparisons are stunning. The average set of wheels last year came with a sticker price close to $13,000--five times higher than in 1960. A 1986 Honda Accord costs as much as a suburban ranch house did in those days. (So, for that matter, does a year at Notre Dame.)

But it takes the average family 23 weeks of income to buy that median car now, vs. 26 weeks in 1960, and it's hardly the same car. The average 1960 Ford, Plymouth, or Chevy, though alluringly mauve or even cerise, had no power steering, no power windows, no stereo tape deck, and no air conditioning. It burned more gas. Handling and braking were atrocious by today's standards. Other safety features and pollution controls weren't part of the package, as witnessed by the scarifying death rate and sooty air of 30 years ago. And choices were among species of Detroit iron distinguished mainly by chrome, tonnage, and finnage--not exactly the vehicles for self-expression encompassed by the present variety of minivans, jeeps, and imports of all types. Even today's $6,000 entry-level car--say an Omni America or Hyundai--is better in most functional ways than the 1956 Cadillac, and it costs just 11 weeks of the average family's income.

As a result, Americans own more cars. The two- and three-car family--a relative rarity in what was supposedly the great age of the automobile--has squeaked over the 50% line in the post-OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] Eighties. Fewer than one in ten households has no car today, vs. one in five in 1960. And we acquire them when we are younger. George Golomb, 40, a Baltimore lawyer who got his first car--a red MG--at age 22, remembers when his parents got theirs: "They were 36 and 37. It was a Chevy. I don't remember the model--just that it was very exciting."

Houses, on the other hand, are less affordable. The typical used house--the kind first-time buyers buy--cost $83,000 last year. The median family had to fork over an $18,000 down payment, $1,725 in closing costs, and 24% of its income every month to call a median-priced home its own. Not surprisingly, the ownership rate for boomers in their early 30s has dropped five percentage points, to 55%, in the Eighties. . . .

Remark at a party that the middle class is being priced out of a college education, and you can expect a chorus of assent. College bills have outpaced inflation since the Fifties, but never by a wider margin than during the past few years. Sending a freshman off to a four-year private college last fall took a cool ten grand. The 1960 father laid out only $1,600 (unadjusted for inflation).

So how is it that college enrollment is at an all-time high? One-half of young adults spend at least some time within the ivy walls, compared with one in four during the Fifties. Answer: Private colleges turn out only about 20% of the country's graduates. The families of the remaining 80% send their kids off to heavily subsidized public colleges. Their bills are only half those of the private-school crowd--and have actually declined slightly as a share of the income of families with college-age children.

The explosion in financial aid for college students also lets many attend who could not in the past. Says Christopher Jencks: "If you couldn't afford college in the Fifties, nobody would lend you money except Uncle Harry, if you had one." Now about half of all freshmen get loans, grants, or work-study jobs on campus, vs. 4% in 1960.

Some of the biggest gains in living standards have come for those who started out the furthest behind. Back in those golden Fifties, most Americans did not notice or care that one-third of the elderly and one-half of black people were destitute. Economic independence for women was not an idea to be taken seriously.

The old in America today work less and live longer, and at the same time they are wealthier and more independent than ever before. Their median per capita income, now higher than that of the average American, has doubled since 1960. Social Security benefits and private pensions have soared. Today's elderly have piled up assets like no generation of oldsters in history: Though they account for just one-sixth of the population, they hold title to one-third of all household net worth and 40% of all financial assets. Fewer than one in ten people over 65 are poor.

As a result the elderly are less likely to be burdens for their offspring--whose living standards are thus improved in ways the statistics fail to capture. Fewer than 10% live with their children, vs. more than 30% in 1950. "I was the Social Security of my parents," says Buddy Mintz, a 76-year-old retired piano salesman in North Miami Beach, Florida. "God forbid my children have to take care of us. The big difference is that my parents had nothing after the Crash. I maintained the family. When my brother and sister got through school, they got jobs and took over."

Today it's more likely that parents and grandparents are helping the kids. In the early Eighties about one-third of first-time home buyers got part of their down payments from relatives, up from about one-tenth in the late Seventies and who knows what tiny fraction in earlier decades. Jon and Ginny Goldsmith, a Chicago couple in their early 30s, got help from Ginny's parents to buy and renovate the three-story apartment building they live in. The couple earns about $30,000 a year, or more than half their income, from their rental property, which includes two other buildings they recently bought with their own cash. Says Ginny: "We took the money my parents gave us and made it worth more."

Barely 20 years ago, after riots swept Detroit, Watts, and ghettos in a dozen other cities, the Kerner Commission report opened with portentous words: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." It didn't happen that way. Instead most blacks have joined the middle class. More than three-fourths of black men now earn middle-class incomes or better, according to James Smith, senior economist, at the Rand Corp. In 1960, 40% of black women were still working as domestics or agricultural laborers, vs. 5% today. And the gap between the earnings of black and white women has nearly disappeared. . . .

The lot of women has changed as much as that of blacks in many ways. The proportion who work is only part of the story--66% hold jobs today, but few remember that a surprising 40% did in 1960. More important is the change in expectations women have of themselves. Some of the newcomers to the labor force are doubtless working because their husbands cannot earn enough. At least as many, and probably more, look at work or a career as imperative in its own right. For many it is a source of power and self-esteem, a worthwhile trade-off for delaying childbearing, and a welcome complement to motherhood afterward.

Since 1960 work has become more rewarding. Significant numbers of women have broken into high-paying, formerly male preserves. About 14% of police officers (vs. 6% in 1960) and 18% of lawyers (vs. 2% in 1960) are women--to cite just two examples. More than a third of all MBAs last year were granted to women. As younger women arrive at the workplace with more credentials--and older ones acquire seniority and experience--women are getting more of the pay. Younger women now earn 75% as much as their male counterparts, vs. 67% in 1960.

Yet there remains disappointment amid plenty. Ask a typical boomer whether he is living better than his parents, and the answer is likely to be, "My head says yes, but my heart says no."

The head and heart are both right. At each rung of the ladder, the boomers can buy more and have a greater variety of choices than their elders. But their parents did move up the ladder faster than these kids, whose sheer numbers have depressed pay levels since they entered the work force. And freedom of choice can impose its own burdens. In the dual-career couple, who will care for the children? Whose aspirations will take the beating when the upward path calls one person to another city? . . .

Mostly, though, we suffer from an acute variant on the timeless theme of high expectations. The reach that exceeds the grasp has always earmarked the American middle class. Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt "feels at once triumphantly wealthy and perilously poor." Wealthy when he eyes his income ("eight thousand good hard iron dollars. Gee that's not so bad"), poor when he contemplates the rising claims on it ("But--Way expenses are--Family wasting gasoline and always dressed like millionaires").

That we are living better, says Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University, is "both true and immaterial if we don't have a criterion by which the cup is full." Boomers are less likely than their parents to feel that enough is enough. Adults in the Fifties did much better than they had been led to expect while growing up during the Depression. Result: A little more felt like a lot. . . . The boomers . . . grew up during the Fifties and Sixties with great expectations. When they flooded into the labor market during the Seventies, reality proved harsher than anticipated. Much more feels like a lot less. . . .

. . . We have largely managed to escape the consequences of slower productivity growth by working more, having smaller families, and, in the Eighties, borrowing from abroad to boost consumption at home. We cannot live beyond our means forever. We may like smaller families, but we won't be happy if our prospects for a better life depend exclusively on greater and greater toil.

That leaves us with a tall order: Raise the growth rate of productivity. That goal has eluded us for 15 years, but the prospects have lately improved. Boomers have gotten older and more experienced. And the corporate drive for greater efficiency is well under way. Two percent a year, twice the trend of the recent past, is the magic number; it's the average for the last 100 years. It sounds less than speedy, but if we reach it our living standards would double yet again by the year 2025, give or take a year or two.

Not bad.

Sylvia Nasar, "Do We Still Live As Well As We Used To?" Fortune (September 14, 1987): 32-45. (c) 1987 Time, Inc.

Does an Economic War Between the Generations Loom? (1987)
Demography is destiny, the saying goes. Few other groups in American society have a more distinctive and complicated demographic destiny than the baby boomers, that bulging generation of Americans born in the two decades after World War II. As they make their way through schools and jobs and on into retirement (when they will constitute a "geezer boom"), their huge numbers produce stresses and strains on all manner of institutions and ways of life. The article that follows explores some troubling economic aspects of the baby boom's progression through history. What problems does the essay find most intractable? How convincing are the proposed solutions? What are the ethnic and racial dimensions of the prospective generational "war"? How realistic is the prediction of a pitched battle between the generations?

A pig in a python is what demographers whimsically call the baby boom, that troublesome lump of 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Almost one-third of the population today, the boomers have distended American society at every stage of their lives, bursting schoolroom walls in the 1950s and upending the nation's tastes and values in the 1960s and 1970s. The worst is yet to come. As the boomers start to retire, they could trigger a bitter war between the generations.

Boomers are likely to demand the same levels of retirement benefits that they pay their parents today through mandatory "contributions" to Social Security. When it comes to Medicare, the hospital insurance and medical benefits available to most people over 65, the boomers will probably ask even more, because they are going to live longer, a blessing mixed with expensive health problems. The younger, much less populous generation that is supposed to pay for these goodies--call them the baby-busters--probably will refuse to shoulder the burden. If they balk, says Ken Dychtwald, 37, a San Francisco gerontologist, the graying boomers "could be sent on a five-day camping trip with two days worth of food." The two generations, enraged by mutual feelings of being cheated, will go for each other's throats.

To avoid this civil war the support system for the elderly ought to be reformed, and the time to start is now, before the battle begins in earnest and while the Social Security trust funds still are flush. Boomers, busters, and the 23 million currently retired all must abandon the traditional view of Social Security. "The assumption that each working generation will take care of the one that preceded it is finished," says Senator David F. Durenberger, 52, a Minnesota Republican and founder of Americans for Generational Equity, or AGE. The old will have to rely increasingly on themselves.

At the moment the traditional system is working well enough to mask the coming conflict. The leading edge of the baby boom recently entered its 40s; almost everyone at the trailing edge has left school and joined the labor force. Under FICA--the Federal Insurance Contributions Act--workers chip in 14.3% of the first $43,800 of their wages to Social Security (15.02% beginning next year), half of it withheld and half paid directly by their employers. In 1986 those contributions raised $194 billion for monthly Social Security stipends to the retired, the survivors of deceased wage earners, and the disabled, as well as $50 billion for hospital bills covered under Medicare. From income taxes unrelated to the FICA payroll tax, the federal government paid out another $18 billion in Medicare benefits for visits to the doctor, and the elderly contributed $5 billion in Medicare premiums. In all, the government lavished 27% of its 1986 budget on Social Security and Medicare, almost exactly the same as its spending for defense.

The biggest part of Social Security is purring along as smoothly as a Rolls-Royce. FICA contributions have so exceeded outlays for the old age, survivors, and disability insurance programs, or OASDI, that the OASDI trust funds, where excess contributions are stored, have burgeoned to $47 billion. As the boomers move into their peak earning years and the number of retired remains relatively small, the funds should keep swelling, to some $1.3 trillion by the year 2000.

But another part of the program is rattling like a jalopy. By 1994, according to the projections of government actuaries, the runaway inflation in health care costs will start eating into the $103-billion trust fund that backs up the hospital insurance portion of Medicare. The fund will run out by 2002. To keep making hospital payments, Congress could try raising payroll taxes yet again. But it probably will take the easy way out and shift billions from the robust OASDI trust funds into the decrepit hospital fund.

Even without that jolt, the entire Social Security system is headed off a cliff. In 1965 the number of births dropped below four million a year, signaling the beginning of the baby bust. Today 3.3 workers toil to support a single beneficiary. By 2010, when the first wave of boomers nears 65, only 2.9 workers will be around to do the job. Ten years later, workers' contributions won't cover outlays, and the Social Security trust funds will have to make up the difference. The funds will start shrinking drastically after 2030, when the support ratio withers to 1.9 workers per beneficiary. As AGE expressed it in a brochure that some senior citizen groups branded as bigotry, the working American family will become "indentured servants."

An immediate way to slow the headlong plunge is to manage the surpluses of the next ten years wisely. As the trust funds grow fatter, Congress will be tempted to use them not just to subsidize existing medical benefits but to expand all payments to retired folk, who vote in proportionately greater numbers than the citizens who support them. Some critics see the thin edge of the wedge in pending legislation to insure the elderly against the costs of catastrophic illness. Though retirees are supposed to pay for the insurance, some Congressmen are already trying to double the size of the program, from $3 billion to about $6 billion. If it keeps mushrooming, the elderly will not be able to afford it, and Congress may dip into Social Security's surpluses.

That would be squandering. The nation must husband surpluses for the boomers' big retirement party or see the Social Security system go broke for sure. True, the system has been close to bankruptcy before and yet has been saved. In 1983 the National Commission on Social Security Reform, chaired by Alan Greenspan, nominee for the job of federal reserve chairman, helped keep the system solvent by delaying a cost-of-living allowance and increasing payroll taxes. A stronger economy with minuscule inflation completed the rescue.

But no rescue is in sight for the long run. Even if Congress keeps its hands off the surpluses, allowing them to compound, the demands of the boomers will throw Social Security into deficit. The level of initial retirement benefits is tied to wages, which are likely to keep compounding at 5.4% a year, as they have since 1947. To give retired boomers the same percentages of their preretirement income that today's elderly receive, and similar medical care, workers of the future will have to turn over as much as 40% of their paychecks.

It is impossible to believe they will be so generous, especially because the two generations will be separated by racial differences as well. The aged population will be largely white. In states like California and Texas, though, much of the work force will be nonwhite, mainly Hispanic. They are sure to resent paying ever more dollars to grandparents who do not look like their grandparents. "The elderly will be seen as an Anglo problem, pediatric health as a Mexican problem," says David Hayes-Bautista, a professor of medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Solutions that avoid forcing the old to pay more are politically tempting, but they seem unworkable in practice. Philip Longman, 31, author of Born to Pay, a study of the boomers' dilemma, suggests that the government swell the size of the future labor force by encouraging families to have more children. People without children, for example, could be taxed to finance day care centers; it will be other people's children, after all, who will take care of childless retirees. But low birth rates seem an inexorable product of affluent societies. France, which has demographic problems similar to those of the U.S., has for years used tax incentives to encourage big families but so far with little success.

Another tactic for beefing up the number of Social Security contributors is to raise immigration quotas. The U.S. could easily boost its labor force by, say, tripling the number of immigrants it admits every year, from 550,000 or so, to 1.7 million. But a flood of immigrants is exactly what organized labor thought it had stemmed with the immigration law that went into effect last May. Congress would be loath to undo its handiwork by radically raising quotas.

Since the supply of contributors is not likely to rise, the demand for Social Security benefits must fall. That will not necessarily lead to hardships that violate the American sense of social justice. The key is a four-point program that would redefine what old is, encourage people to pay more for their own retirement, spread the burden of support among the elderly, and avoid inflating health care costs even more.

Workers Should Stay on the Job Until 70

Better health care and working conditions are keeping people younger. Most employers are forbidden to impose a mandatory retirement age. Yet the country still is stuck with 65 as the official beginning of old age, the time at which a worker can retire on full Social Security pay and Qualify for Medicare.

Despite their fitness for the workplace, Americans are quitting young. Nearly half of all men between 61 and 64 are retired. Corporations encourage early leave-taking these days because they want to trim their payrolls. The Social Security system gives companies and employees an incentive to part company. By retiring at 62 a worker can collect monthly benefits equal to 80% of those he would have received if he had waited until 65. With that kind of deal, most people have little reason for continuing to work.

Thanks to the Social Security reform commission, the age at which a worker can qualify for full retirement benefits will inch up in the next century. Someone who turns 25 this year cannot get full benefits until he is 67. That's the right idea, but the pace is too slow. The scheduled rises in the qualifying age mean that the officially old will constitute 18% of the population in 2030, vs. 12% today.

The government should make 70 the eligibility age for the first of the boomers, today's 41-year-olds. That way only 15% of the population would qualify for full benefits in 2030, easing the burden on working stiffs. Eliminating early retirement, shrinking early retirement benefits, or raising the early retirement age also would help.

Workers Should Get Bigger Tax Breaks for Funding Their Own Retirement

A typical worker who retired last year at 65 will, by one measure, strike a bonanza. By collecting $583 a month he will in four years recover everything he paid out. But the young worker starting out may be lucky just to get his money back. . . .

. . . Workers who earn more than $35,000 a year and are covered by corporate pension plans are no longer allowed to deduct IRA [individual retirement account] contributions. Congress should reverse itself. Doing so would cost the Treasury about $5 billion a year. To boost IRA saving, the government must also confess the truth: It will pay today's workers much leaner retirement benefits than today's elderly get.

Rich Retirees Should Subsidize Poor Ones

"People like me don't deserve Social Security," insists Donald MacNaughton, 70, who as a former chairman of Prudential Insurance Co. receives a pension of $180,000 a year. A selfless thought, to be sure, but dropping the wealthy from the rolls would be a dud on Capitol Hill. The protectors of Social Security maintain that the only way to ensure broad support for the program is to give the mighty as well as the humble a stake in it.

The solution is to let rich and poor alike collect Social Security but tax benefits as fully as wage and investment income. At present many of the 2.2 million or so elderly with incomes above $25,000 pay taxes on up to half their Social Security benefits. Alan Greenspan suggests taxing the full amount of benefits like any other income. . . .

Don't Pay for Nursing Home Care with More Payroll Taxes

Medicare pays nothing for nursing home treatment, which costs $22,000 a year on average. Many retired people in nursing homes are forced to empty their pockets and sell their assets until they are down to several thousand dollars and a house, which qualifies them to apply for Medicaid, the program that helps the poor of all ages. It's a cruel solution to a problem that will only grow with the longer lives and greater numbers of the retired. . . .

. . . If they want to avoid selling their assets while they are alive, they and their heirs may have to go along with broader, higher inheritance taxes. The net worth of those over 65 amounts to about $2 trillion, according to a 1984 Census Bureau survey, and 5% or so is passed on to heirs every year. Representative Jim Moody, 51, a Democrat from Milwaukee and co-chairman of AGE, sees those assets as a logical way to pay for nursing home care: "It's not fair to spend society's money to preserve assets for someone's children."

None of these steps will ease the pain of dealing with the last big bulge that the baby-boomers make. Today the U.S. spends 11% of GNP on health, more than most other industrial nations. That share will come to 15% by 2000, thanks to the rising cost of high-tech medical care. The biggest jump will come after 2026, when the first boomers reach 80. At that age, they become the "old old," who require the most intensive treatment.

Should society pay without question for costly medical machines and procedures to keep the old old alive? "Taking care of the elderly is an endless open frontier," says Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which studies medical ethics. "Maybe we shouldn't spend any more on health. Our roads are in terrible shape, and so are our secondary schools." Callahan and others argue that society should ration its spending among the generations, which would mean spending less to prolong the lives of the elderly.

The issues that divide the generations are literally matters of life and death. The hard choices must be made eventually. The question is, which generation will make them.

From Fortune "The War Between the Generations" by Lee Smith July 20, 1987, pp. 78-82, (c) 1987 Time Inc.

Betty Friedan Strikes a Blow for Women's Freedom (1963)
By the early 1960s millions of American women were working for wages outside their homes. Yet cultural values had not kept pace with this change, and a woman's "proper" role was still considered to be in the kitchen and the nursery. In 1963 Betty Friedan published a remarkable book, The Feminine Mystique, vigorously attacking that traditional definition of women's place. Her book helped massively to launch the modern women's movement. How, exactly, does she define the "feminine mystique"? Why does she find it so objectionable? Is she speaking about all women, or about a particular class of women?

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights--the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but more of the younger women no longer thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.

By the end of the nineteen-fifties, the average marriage age of women in America dropped to 20, and was still dropping, into the teens. Fourteen million girls were engaged by 17. The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. Colleges built dormitories for "married students," but the students were almost always the husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives--"Ph.T." (Putting Husband Through). . . .

By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India's. The birth-control movement, renamed Planned Parenthood, was asked to find a method whereby women who had been advised that a third or fourth baby would be born dead or defective might have it anyhow. Statisticians were especially astounded at the fantastic increase in the number of babies among college women. Where once they had two children, now they had four, five, six. Women who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced Life magazine in a 1956 paean to the movement of American women back to the home.

In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found she could not breastfeed her baby. In other hospitals, women dying of cancer refused a drug which research had proved might save their lives: its side effects were said to be unfeminine. "If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde," a larger-than-life-sized picture of a pretty, vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine, and drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models. Department-store buyers reported that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller. "Women are out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa," one buyer said.

Interior decorators were designing kitchens with mosaic murals and original paintings, for kitchens were once again the center of women's lives. Home sewing became a million-dollar industry. Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement with their husbands. Girls were growing up in America without ever having jobs outside the home. In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly remarked: a third of American women now worked, but most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers. They were married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or to help pay the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting families. Fewer and fewer women were entering professional work. The shortages in the nursing, social work, and teaching professions caused crises in almost every American city. Concerned over the Soviet Union's lead in the space race, scientists noted that America's greatest source of unused brain-power was women. But girls would not study physics: it was "unfeminine." A girl refused a science fellowship at Johns Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate office. All she wanted, she said, was what every other American girl wanted--to get married, have four children and live in a nice house in a nice suburb.

The suburban housewife--she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife--freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.

In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children's clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank; "Occupation: housewife." . . .

If the woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it. . . .

But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, "the problem." And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone.

Gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no name was shared by countless women in America. As a magazine writer I often interviewed women about problems with their children, or their marriages, or their houses, or their communities. But after a while I began to recognize the telltale signs of this other problem. I saw the same signs in suburban ranch houses and split-levels on Long Island and in New Jersey and Westchester County; in colonial houses in a small Massachusetts town; on patios in Memphis; in suburban and city apartments; in living rooms in the Midwest. Sometimes I sensed the problem, not as a reporter, but as a suburban housewife, for during this time I was also bringing up my own three children in Rockland County, New York. I heard echoes of the problem in college dormitories and semi-private maternity wards, at PTA meetings and luncheons of the League of Women Voters, at suburban cocktail parties, in station wagons waiting for trains, and in snatches of conversation overheard at Schrafft's. The groping words I heard from other women, on quiet afternoons when children were at school or on quiet evenings when husbands worked late, I think I understood first as a woman long before I understood their larger social and psychological implications.

Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say, "I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete." Or she would say, "I feel as if I don't exist." Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. . . .

It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands are struggling interns and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and executives who make $5,000 a year or $50,000. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.

It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women unfeminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied voice within themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in fact, that this is the first clue to the mystery: the problem cannot be understood in the generally accepted terms by which scientists have studied women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and writers have written about them. Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in the pursuit of feminine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children. For the oldest of these women, these daughters of the American middle class, no other dream was possible. The ones in their forties and fifties who once had other dreams gave them up and threw themselves joyously into life as housewives. For the youngest, the new wives and mothers, this was the only dream. They are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until they married. These women are very "feminine" in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem. . . .

If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and puzzling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home."

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, pp. 11-16, 22-27, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 

Margaret Mead Assesses the Modern Family (1971)
In the 1960s many young people, disenchanted with "middle-American" values, sought alternative life-styles--sometimes in communes designed to replace the traditional family structure. Some alarmists saw in such developments the end of civilization as they had known it. The noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, in the following selection, offers a balanced historical perspective. What features of conventional family life does she criticize? What is her prediction for the future of the family? How does she judge the changing role of women in the post-World War II era? How do her views of women's role compare with those of Betty Friedan (see previous selection)?

Whenever there is a period of upheaval in the world, somebody's going to do something to the family. If the family's being very rigorous and puritanical, you loosen it up. And if it's being very loose, you tighten it up. But you have to change it to really feel you're accomplishing something. If we go back into history we find over and over again, in moments of revolutionary change, that people start talking about the family, and what they're doing to it, and what's wrong with it. They even predict it's going to disappear altogether. It is in fact the only institution we have that doesn't have a hope of disappearing.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back. You can get rid of it if you live in an enclave and keep everybody else out, and bring the children up to be unfit to live anywhere else. They can go on ignoring the family for several generations. But such communities are not part of the main world. . . .

It's very, very difficult to lead a life unless you're married. So everybody gets married--and unmarried--and married, but they're all married to somebody most of the time. And so that we have, in a sense, overdepended on marriage in this country. We've vastly overdone it. . . .

The Nuclear Family is a family consisting of one adult man and one adult woman, married to each other, and minor children. The presence of any other person in the household is an insult. The only people that can come in are cleaning women and sitters. In-laws become sitters--which means that when they come in, you go out, and you never have to see them. Furthermore, today, mothers are very uncomfortable with adolescent daughters in the house. So they push them out as rapidly as possible. If they're rich, they send them to Barnard, and if they're poor, they get them married, and they work at it, very hard, because there isn't room in the kind of kitchens we've had since 1945 for two women.

We have put on the Nuclear Family an appalling burden, because young couples were expected to move as far from both sets of relatives as they could, and they had to move, a great deal of the time.

Millions and millions of Americans move every year, moving miles from relatives or anybody that they know. We know now that the chances of a post-partum depression for a woman are directly proportional to the distance she is from any female relative or friend. When we put her in a new suburb all by herself, her chances of getting a post-partum depression go way up. There are millions of young families living in such suburbs, knowing nobody, with no friends, no support of any kind.

Furthermore, each spouse is supposed to be all things to the other. They're supposed to be good in bed, and good out of it. Women are supposed to be good cooks, good mothers, good wives, good skiers, good conversationalists, good accountants. Neither person is supposed to find any sustenance from anybody else. . . .

So it's a good style of family for change, but it's a hazardous kind of family, nonetheless. And if it is hazardous enough in the city, it's a hundred percent more hazardous in the suburbs. There's a special kind of isolation that occurs in the suburbs. So the attack on the Nuclear Family is, I think, thoroughly justified.

There is a need to have more people around: more people to hold the baby, more people to pitch in in emergencies, more people to help when the child is sick, when the mother is sick, more children for other children to play with so you don't have to spend a thousand dollars sending them to nursery school, more kinds of adults around for the children to pick models from in case father or mother can't do the things they want to do. . . .

We've been cheating women when, in the last ten years, we wanted women to work. We were very short of cheap labor so we told them they needed to be fulfilled. The last source of educated cheap labor was women. So finally everybody discovered that it is very unfulfilling to stay at home, and a woman, of course, when she had her children, maybe she would stay at home for a few years and then she'd leave to be fulfilled. And the foundations gave money, centers were established to lure her out and get her re-educated.

But of course they weren't going to pay her like men, because after all she was more interested in her home, she wouldn't want to leave her children, and you know art lessons sometimes take up more time than little babies--and so she'd want a job from which she could get home early like being a clerk in a team-teaching outfit, instead of a teacher. Something like that--so she could go home when her children did. And of course she wouldn't want to be very ambitious, because all the strain would be bad; she'd want to keep something for home.

In the last ten years, women have been pretty well beguiled and bedazzled into becoming self-fulfilling, educated cheap labor. And I think it's not surprising if some of them are saying that they think they are exploited, and they don't want to be exploited any more.

At the end of World War II, when they wanted all the women that held jobs to go home so the men could get them back, women who'd done well in Washington were told they were overmature, overexperienced:--"Please go home."

I think we'll be bringing girls up with more sense of themselves as people, and that they're going to be people all the way through. If they choose parenthood, they'll choose it much more as they've chosen vocations, and much less as if it were just something the neighbors are doing.

From "Future Families" by Margaret Mead, Transaction, vol. 8, no. 11, pp. 52-53. 1971 by Transaction Publishers.

A Bill of Rights for Modern Women (1967)
The National Organization for Women (NOW), which Betty Freidan helped to found, emerged in the 1960s as one of the foremost champions of women's rights. At its first national conference in 1967, NOW adopted the following resolution. What does it reveal about the nature of the modern women's movement? How does it compare with the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848? (See Vol. I, Chapter 17) What aspects of women's situation changed the most between 1848 and 1967? What caused those changes?

We Demand:

I. That the U.S. Congress immediately pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to provide that "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex," and that such then be immediately ratified by the several States.

II. That equal employment opportunity be guaranteed to all women, as well as men, by insisting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforces the prohibitions against sex discrimination in employment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the same vigor as it enforces the prohibitions against racial discrimination.

III. That women be protected by law to ensure their rights to return to their jobs within a reasonable time after childbirth without loss of seniority or other accrued benefits, and be paid maternity leave as a form of social security and/or employee benefit.

IV. Immediate revision of tax laws to permit the deduction of home and child care expenses for working parents.

V. That child care facilities be established by law on the same basis as parks, libraries, and public schools, adequate to the needs of children from the pre-school years through adolescence, as a community resource to be used by all citizens from all income levels.

VI. That the right of women to be educated to their full potential equally with men be secured by Federal and State legislation, eliminating all discrimination and segregation by sex, written and unwritten, at all levels of education, including colleges, graduate and professional schools, loans and fellowships, and Federal and State training programs such as the Job Corps.

VII. The right of women in poverty to secure job training, housing, and family allowances on equal terms with men, but without prejudice to a parent's right to remain at home to care for his or her children; revision of welfare legislation and poverty programs which deny women dignity, privacy and self-respect.

VIII. The right of women to control their own reproductive lives by removing from penal codes laws limiting access to contraceptive information and devices and laws governing abortion.

IX. Amendment of Title II of the Civil Rights Act and state laws to include prohibition of sex discrimination in places of public accommodation, housing.

X. Revision of marriage, divorce and family laws to equalize the rights of men and women to own property, establish domicile, maintain individual identity and economic independence, etc., and promote marriage as an equal partnership of shared responsibility in all its aspects.

National Organization for Women.

A Congresswoman Demands Equal Rights for Women (1984)
U.S. Representative Pat Schroeder of Colorado emerged in the 1980s as a leading champion of women's issues. Here she advocates the controversial idea of comparable worth as a way to overcome the economic liabilities carried by women in the so-called pink-collar ghetto--that set of low-paying job categories filled almost exclusively by women. What are the economic disadvantages that particularly affect women? Is the doctrine of comparable worth an appropriate remedy for those disadvantages? Is it workable in a free-market economy? What other policies (for example, subsidized child-care centers) might be appropriate (and practical) to consider?

. . .Paradoxically, as women have made great strides in education their economic fortunes stagnated. Because of job segregation and pay inequities, the wage gap between men and women has widened.

Contrary to what one might expect, the wage gap is about the same regardless of educational level. Women, high school drop-out or college graduate, receive less than 60 cents for every dollar earned by an equally educated man.

In my opinion, the single most important women's issue in the 1980s will be comparable worth--equal pay for jobs of comparable value.

A history lesson. Just over twenty years ago, in 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act requiring businesses to pay equal wages for equal work. If you think that was a simple move, you're wrong. The fight to pass that law went on for years. Employer organizations argued it would cost them too much money and was improper government interference.

The equal pay fight was just the beginning. The simple fact remains that occupations filled with women--nursing, teaching, and secretarial--are generally low paying.

Comparable worth does not mean pay men less, nor does it mean pay women more. It means pay PEOPLE what they are worth. In many cases it will mean paying women more--I'm sure we can live with that.

Now the naysayers argue that there are no standards--no one can determine what a job is worth.

If you will permit me a farm term, that's hog wash. Every business, company, union and government agency has standards to set wages and salaries. Large corporations even have rules to decide the size of your office, the carpet on the floor, and the size of desk you get.

No, the problem is not lack of standards. The problem is that there are standards and the standards are wrong.

When a nurse or a high school math teacher with a college education is paid less than a liquor store clerk with a high school education, there is something wrong with our wage standards, not to mention our values.

One of the naysayers, Phyllis Schlafly, was in Colorado recently. She said that liquor store clerks should be paid more than nurses because they lift heavy boxes; and tree trimmers should be paid more than teachers because they work outdoors.

Fine, let's pay nurses the same as surgeons, because they both work indoors. And secretaries the same as lawyers because neither lifts heavy boxes. Furthermore, the kids who deliver our newspapers should be paid six figure salaries because they drag about heavy bundles and brave the elements.

The real cause of the wage disparity is that most women's jobs--80 percent of all women are in 25 job categories like nursing, teaching, service and office jobs--are not highly valued. Can someone explain to me why cutting a lawn is more valuable to society than teaching kindergarten?

In the first successful, major comparable worth lawsuit in the U.S., the federal case decided in Seattle last month,* the judge found that there were standards, and the state of Washington violated them. There was a 20 percent disparity between jobs held largely by women and jobs held largely by men.

Paradoxically, as we see more women in the work force and more women getting more education, we are also seeing the feminization of poverty.

The startling rise in the number of female heads of household and poor elderly women has feminized poverty. Divorce is a pivotal factor. Although there are indications that the divorce rate may have plateaued in recent years, between 1920 and 1980 it more than tripled.

And if it has leveled off, it's a rather high plateau--more than 50 percent of marriages contracted today will end in divorce, separation or desertion. The economic effect of divorce on women, especially those with children, is nothing short of disastrous.

Less than half the women who retain custody of the children receive their full, court-ordered child support. Almost one quarter receive nothing.

A California study of 3,000 divorced couples found that one year after divorce, the woman's income had dropped 73 percent while the man's had increased 43 percent! It is little wonder, if present trends continue, that by the year 2000, the poor in America will be almost entirely women and children.

The anti-ERA [equal rights amendment] lobby talks a lot about women needing to be "protected." But that's exactly the point of the ERA: inequality is no protection. Whatever the standard--wages, pensions, child support, survivors' benefits--women come up short.

It is no wonder the ERA has become an economic issue. The gender gap, the difference between how men and women tend to vote, is largely based on economic issues. Inequality is an economic issue. . . .

*AFSCME v. State of Washington 770 F.2d 1401 (9th Cir. 1985).

Pat Schroeder, "Great Expectations: From Abigail Adams to the White House," Vital Speeches of the Day, May 15, 1984, pp. 472-474.

Black Enterprise Champions Affirmative Action (1978)
Black Americans scored dramatic social and economic gains in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks largely to the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the vigorous commitment of the federal government, especially in the Johnson administration, to making black civil rights a reality, not just a dream. Affirmative-action programs, designed to redress historical injustices by giving women and members of minority groups preference in hiring and admission to educational institutions, were one vehicle by which blacks speeded their progress into the mainstream of U.S. society. Then in 1978 the United States Supreme Court cast a cloud over affirmative-action programs in the case of University of California Regents v. Bakke.* Allan Bakke, a white candidate for admission to the Medical School of the University of California at Davis, claimed that he was denied admission because of the school's policy of reserving several places in the entering class for minority students. The Court held that it was unlawful to take minority status so explicitly into account in admissions decisions, and ordered the school to admit Bakke. (However, in its complex and confusing opinion, the Court did not altogether rule out reliance on ethnic or racial criteria in the admissions process.) Black Enterprise, a magazine aimed primarily at black readers, criticizes the Bakke decision in the following editorial. The magazine endorses the dissenting opinion of the Court's only African-American justice, Thurgood Marshall. What does the editorial especially admire about Marshall's position? How sound is the argument that "in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently"?

There are moments in your life when you feel you've reached a turning point; when you stop, make an assessment of your situation and feel good, knowing that hard work, effort and imagination have paid off. These moments are all too few and, invariably, before they can be fully appreciated they are shattered by the naked reality of the daily struggle. Last June was such a time.

In that month, the President of the United States [Jimmy Carter], for the first time in the nation's history, invited the leading black executives in the country to the White House so that he could personally inform them of the policies and directions of his administration, especially as they affect black economic well-being.

The assemblage was historic: a gathering of men--and one woman--linked not only by race but by success, not only by ideology or civil rights but by their proven ability to run businesses, employ people, meet payrolls. When one considers that over one hundred years ago their ancestors could own nothing--not even themselves; that fifty years ago their fathers could probably not borrow money from the local bank or be insured; that fifteen years ago the very meeting they attended at the White House could not have been held, the significance of that moment at the White House brightens. Here were over one hundred black executives who had started out with little more than hope, now standing at the symbolic seat to power. Through their companies they represented an aggregate wealth of almost nine hundred million dollars. It was a moment to remember, to savor.

But not for long. A little over two weeks after this gathering came the stinging reality of the racial struggle these businessmen face--the Bakke decision.

On June 28, the Supreme Court of the United States rendered its much awaited decision on the Bakke case. Suddenly, affirmative action was out and, incredibly, blacks could be charged with discriminating against whites. There is much discussion concerning the Bakke decision. Some claim the case was interpreted "narrowly" and that blacks, if not achieving a total victory, at least were not subjected to a total loss.

I am not a lawyer but a businessman. As I go about the task of keeping my organization going I encounter many whites and know that for some of them the Bakke decision means that affirmative action is over. Many companies were faint of heart when they began their programs. This decision will encourage them to stop their efforts altogether. However, we must insist that those firms that have programs continue them; we must insist that those firms doing business with black entrepreneurs continue doing so; we must lobby for the continuation of set asides and we must hold the administration to its commitment to triple federal contract procurement no matter what was decided in Bakke.

The fact that the Court seems to have sanctioned the use of race as a factor in determining admissions should not lull us into inaction. Bakke means that blacks are in trouble. This was nowhere stated more clearly or succinctly than in Justice Marshall's dissent. Marshall said:

I agree with the judgment of the Court only insofar as it permits a university to consider the race of an applicant in making admissions decisions. I do not agree that the petitioner's admissions program violated the Constitution. For it must be remembered that during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution as interpreted by this Court, did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro. Now, when a State acts to remedy the effects of the legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.

The position of the Negro today in America is the tragic but inevitable consequence of centuries of unequal treatment. Measured by any benchmark of conduct or achievement, meaningful equality remains a distant dream for the Negro.

It is because of a legacy of unequal treatment that we now must permit the institutions of this society to give consideration to race in making decisions about who will hold the position of influence, affluence and prestige in America. For far too long, the doors to those positions have been shut to Negroes. If we are ever to become a fully integrated society, one in which the color of a person's skin will not determine the opportunities available to him or her, we must be willing to take steps to open those doors. I do not believe that anyone can truly look into America's past and still find that a remedy for the effects of the past is impermissible . . .

I fear that we have come full circle. After the Civil War our government started several "affirmative action" programs. This Court in the Civil Rights cases and Plessy v. Ferguson destroyed the movement toward complete equality. For almost a century no action was taken and this nonaction was with the tacit approval of the Courts. Then we had Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Acts of Congress followed by numerous affirmative action programs. Now, we have this Court again stepping in, this time to stop affirmative action programs of the type used by the University of California.

Marshall's eloquence in defense of the admission's policy was matched by that of Justice Blackmun who observed that "In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently." . . .

*438 U.S. 265 (1978).

Black Enterprise 9 (August 1978): 7. The Earl G. Graves Publishing Co., Inc., 295 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10017. 

Conservative Pundit George Will Blasts Reverse Discrimination (1978)
Conservative columnist George Will also disliked the Bakke decision--because it failed to put an end, once and for all, to the "reverse discrimination" of affirmative-action programs. How does his argument fit with that of Black Enterprise magazine, just given? What are the American values that Will believes are being betrayed by "reverse discrimination"? Is he right?

"You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world," Herman Melville wrote in 1849. ". . . Our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world." But government policy has been, increasingly, to divide the majestic national river into little racial and ethnic creeks. If that policy succeeds, the United States will be less a nation than an angry menagerie of factions scrambling for preference in the government's allocation of entitlements.

That policy was endorsed by the Administration's brief against Allan Bakke, a brief which urged that the nation should cultivate "race consciousness." The brief did not suggest how the government will decide, someday, that persons who have been "victims," personally or through "their forebears," have been "restored"--a strange choice of verb--"to the position they would have occupied" but for discrimination. The Bakke decision pleases the Administration.

Bakke won because a medical school, with no record of discrimination to rectify, adopted a numerical quota for certain minorities, and admitted some who were dramatically less qualified than he was. The Bakke decision has made little law. Therefore, most existing policies will continue, so the law can be riddled with racial considerations. With regard to higher education, the decision suggests broad tolerance for reverse-discrimination policies that are less raw than that which excluded Bakke. And Justice Powell's opinion for the Court can be read plausibly as somewhat permissive regarding considerations of race and ancestry in the allocation of other government benefits generally.

"Suspect" Distinctions

The opinion says racial and ethnic distinctions are "suspect" and require "exacting judicial examination." But when state distribution of benefits "hinges" on race or ethnicity, the racial and ethnic classifications are acceptable if they are "necessary" to promote a "substantial" state interest, such as diversity in enrollments. Four Justices even assert the constitutionality of programs like the one that excluded Bakke, programs that do not just use "minority status as a positive factor," but that "set aside a predetermined number of places" for minorities. These Justices say, not groundlessly: "For purposes of constitutional adjudication, there is no difference between the two approaches."

Powell says that the "equal protection" clause precludes "recognition of special wards entitled to a degree of protection greater than that accorded others"; he rejects a "two-class theory" of equal protection. But then he says there can be compelling state interests served by constitutional forms of discrimination which disadvantage whites for the benefit of preferred minorities. This necessarily means distinguishing two classes of citizens.

Powell says there is a distinction of constitutional dimension between an "explicit racial classification" that "totally" excludes members of some groups from full participation in a program, and "properly devised" racial considerations that are "flexible" in treating race or ancestry as a "plus." But this can be a distinction without a significant difference. For most professional schools, the pool of qualified minority applicants is shallow. Schools that dip too deeply will produce striking disparities between the test scores and academic records of minorities and whites they accept. At some point such disparities must be prima facie evidence of a quota, whether it is acknowledged or surreptitious.

"Statistical Parity"

The Bakke decision does not necessarily mean the Court will say that reverse discrimination in employment and awarding contracts is "necessary" to a "substantial" state interest. But the Court may not seriously impede the bureaucratic drive to transform the core concept of American justice from "equal opportunity for individuals" to "statistical parity for government-approved groups." There is, indeed, a substantial state interest in broadening membership in the middle class, and especially in professions. But the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection to "persons," and any reverse discrimination grants special entitlements to preferred groups. Nevertheless, the Bakke decision will leave unscathed an array of programs by which the government encourages or compels public and private institutions to consider ethnic quantities more, and individual qualities less, when conferring benefits.

In 1954, the Court seemed on the way to saying what Congress subsequently seemed to say in the 1964 Civil Rights Act: race is an inherently unacceptable basis for state action. But now, in the Bakke case, the Court has refused to find that principle in the 1964 act, and the Court rejected that principle in cases before Bakke. For example, it held that states can tailor redistricting plans racially to create or preserve legislative districts that enhance the electoral power of preferred minorities (in the particular case, blacks and Puerto Ricans). The plan in question diluted the electoral strength of Hassidic Jews who do not enjoy government preference.

Wards of the State

Reverse discrimination began as a means of ameliorating the condition of blacks, but it was quickly claimed as a "right" by groups defined by race, ancestry or sex. It is demanded in spite of the fact that it devalues the achievements of its beneficiaries and stigmatizes them as wards of the state, unable to compete. This taint is not disguised by tactical euphemisms, such as saying that employers must "differentially validate" employment tests when they are required to set lower passing scores for preferred minorities than for whites. Whether called "affirmative action" or (as in the 1976 Democratic platform) "compensatory opportunity," reverse discrimination, and the quest for statistical parity for "underrepresented" groups, involve what Prof. Ben L. Martin calls the "sensory" theory of representation: "only personal qualities crude enough to be obvious to sense perception, such as skin color, language, or sex, are acceptable bases of representation." Martin explains reverse discrimination in terms of "the foot-race analogy":

"In a fair race, none is disadvantaged at the starting line. But if all begin with equal advantage, then all should finish together, because contemporary liberalism leaves virtually no personal quality--not character, personality, motivation, self-discipline, or any other personal trait--as the responsibility of the individual."

The premise behind reverse discrimination is this: an unfair start can be inferred from an unequal outcome. The traditional American premise is this: the equal status of citizenship is the basis on which a structure of inequality should be built by a population in which talents are neither equally distributed nor equally rewarded. Reverse discrimination is a betrayal, not a fulfillment, of American values.

George Will, "Reverse Discrimination," Newsweek 92 (July 10, 1978): 84. 

Robert Coles Examines the White American Mind (1966)
The racial upheavals of the postwar era unsettled many white Americans. White northerners, long smug about their moral superiority to white southerners in racial matters, suddenly realized in the 1960s that they, too, had to confront the United States' historic racial problems firsthand. Robert Coles, a psychiatrist with a deep interest in the psychological effects of changing racial relationships, interviewed several northern white families while preparing the following article. How do these white people view themselves? What is their attitude toward blacks? Are they bigots, pure and simple?

Recently in Boston some Negro children were bused into neighborhood schools serving white children, not by the city, but upon the initiative of individual Negro parents. Indignation spread through the area. The people became aroused, and in unusually large numbers registered their sentiments at the polls. There is uneasy talk about a so-called "white backlash vote," waiting in the wings to single out and dismiss summarily anyone trying to give special favor to Negroes, most particularly by encouraging them to live and to go to school in white neighborhoods.

Here are the words of a thirty-year-old woman, the mother of six. She is Irish. Her husband works in the repair shop of a utility company. They live in a mixed Irish and Italian neighborhood in Boston where homes vary, some modestly comfortable and well kept, others in obvious decline. Her young children now have several Negro children in classes with them, and though the two young boys and the little girl do not seem to mind, their mother is quite upset.

Why do they do it? I don't understand them at all. They have their own people, just as we do, but suddenly they're not happy together. They want to go here and there, and send their children everywhere. All you hear these days is news about them. You'd think Negroes were the only people in America that have a tough time. What about the rest of us? Who comes here asking us how we get by, or how we feel about what we had to go through?

My father couldn't find a job either, not a steady one, anyway. I remember my mother telling us how he walked and walked, practically begging for work. She said he would almost offer to work for nothing rather than sit around home doing nothing. The day he applied for relief was the saddest day of his life. It broke him. He hated himself ever after. He was always against taking charity, and to have to ask for it was too much for him. When the war came he got steady work again, but my mother said he never was the same. He was always nervous, worried about losing his job, like in the thirties. He became very tight with his money; he even hoarded pennies in a bank. . . . He was plain scared for the rest of his life. To be truthful, I think he died happy. It was like a relief for him. He was very religious. He went to Mass every morning. He died with a smile on his face, and our mother, she said he had been waiting for that day for a long time. He used to say to her that whether it was heaven or hell the good Lord chose for him, it would be better than the worry and the trying to make ends meet of this world.

That's the trouble, though, with Negroes. They're a superstitious lot. They have no real faith, except all that shouting they do, and they only know how to ask, not go out and earn. I know they had it bad here, but so did we all, my father and everyone else practically, except for the rich. And it's the rich, out there in the suburbs, who keep on telling us what we should do. They preach at us to take them here and let them live there, and act this way to them, and that, and so on until you get sick hearing it all. Suddenly they're so kind, the suburban crowd. They stepped all over us, and kept us out of everything, the Yankees and the college people over there at Harvard did. Now they're so good. They're all excited and worried about people, but only the Negroes get their sympathy, only them. Talking about prejudice, that's what we face, prejudice against us. I think we should start suing in all the courts, and marching down those streets, like the Negroes. Maybe if we had done that a long time ago, we wouldn't still be so up against now.

In nearly every interview, I hear in one way or another certain common themes: we all have it rough, the Negro being only one of many in that regard; what the Negro calls the civil rights movement in the North is in fact an attempt to crowd out others, from schools, jobs, and opportunities of one sort or another; no one is entitled to anything "special," not when others have to sit by and get little or nothing; somehow the Negro is rather devious and clever, as well as half-witted and immoral, because he has managed to exact both sympathy and consistent help from people--the well born, the well educated--who have ignored the misery of other people for decades.

In the South the Negro can be lived with by the white man, at very close quarters, too. Even the poorest white man can keep company with Negroes, share jokes and general talk with them. The white child can play with Negroes; while growing up he can eat from their hands; as an adult he works with them every day. The Negro's general position helps the white man feel on sure ground, above the uncertain social and economic waters that threaten most of us at one time or another with feelings of worthlessness or insecurity. In the particular situations of daily life, however, a given Negro can be depended upon, even though, as a race, they can be excluded or looked down upon.

In the North, for many white people the Negro, perhaps pitied in the past, is now a constant topic of news and conversation. He comes upon a scene where his presence is new. He comes upon a region with its own history of religious prejudices and racial antagonisms, at times cloaked perhaps, but no less grim and brutal than those the South has lived with so defiantly. While he has aroused the concern, even the devotion, of many, to others his arrival and the widespread solicitous response to his arrival only confirm a number of existing fears and suspicions. Life is indeed harshly competitive; another group is coming, and at a time when jobs may be scarce. Moreover, those who favor the Negro and want so earnestly to aid him are the very people who care not at all about the poor (and white) people who have been living in the cities and towns of the North for generations, or at least before the Negro came to stake out his claim. . . .

In many ways the poor and lower-middle-class white people in our Northern cities are going through a kind of experience precisely opposite to that of Negroes. At this time in history Negroes are being affirmed, while these white people feel increasingly deserted and alone. The Negro's excuse for his present condition is everywhere made known: it was not his fault, but ours. We carried him here by force and kept him in bondage for three centuries. He was not simply poor, but singled out for a very particular form of exploitation. The brutality and exclusion that he experienced have now become our national problem, because the price once exacted for the Negro's compliance lives on in the illiteracy and fearfulness we encouraged in him for so long.

In the Northern cities a white man who is poor has no such past history to justify his condition. He is poor, or uneasily not-poor, but no more than that. Even our expanding middle class has its definite limitations. Those limitations are now shifting in character, but by no means disappearing. While it is true that educational opportunity and the money to secure it are much more available than ever before, we are also facing severe technological problems, as machines replace not only men but other machines. It no longer is fatuous to predict an astonishing productivity harnessed to a relative handful of workers.

Meanwhile, we stubbornly cling to an ethic that prefers to reward only those who can find work, while consigning all the rest to charity, and not a little contempt. Through no fault of their own, not improvidence, not ignorance, not apathy, many people simply cannot obtain the regular work they want and need. Others may have reasonably secure jobs, but they are jobs that hardly pay enough to guarantee much security against an inflationary economy. "Who can keep up with it?" a mother who was barely able to make ends meet said to me in an aside during a talk we were having on racial tensions in Boston.

The Negroes say they have nothing. Well, we have more, that's true. My husband works, and it's a steady job. We're Irish, so in this city there's no trouble there, I'll have to admit. But it's as hard as can be just living and staying even with everything. My husband has to work extra just to pay the bills. We don't have any money put away. The kids always want something. All the television does is tell you to buy, buy, buy. A few years ago my husband didn't have a job, and we didn't know where our next penny was coming from. Now he has the job all right, but it's even harder in a way. Any raise he gets means nothing compared to what happens to the cost of everything. We have to be an owner of something or a professional man to have an easy mind today.

On another occasion I found her directly envious of Negroes. They were on the bottom, and at least had somewhere to go. She didn't think there was much room "up there" for her family. Moreover, the Negro gets an enormous amount of sympathy and attention, and from people and institutions she feels possessive about. As a matter of fact, in one of the bluntest conversations I have ever had, she said to me:

They may be poorer than a lot of white people, but not by very much. Anyway, what they don't get in money they more than gain in popularity these days. The papers have suddenly decided that the Negro is teacher's pet. Whatever he does good is wonderful, and we should clap. But if he does anything bad, it's our fault. I can't read the papers anymore when they talk about the race thing. I'm sick of their editorials. All of a sudden they start giving us a lecture every day on how bad we are. They never used to care about anything, the Negro or anything else. Now they're so worried. And the same goes with the Church. I'm as devout a Catholic as you'll find around. My brother is a priest, and I do more than go to Church once a week. But I just can't take what some of our priests are saying these days. They're talking as if we did something wrong for being white. I don't understand it at all. Priests never used to talk about the Negro when I was a child. Now they talk to my kids about them all the time. I thought the Church is supposed to stand for religion, and eternal things. They shouldn't get themselves into every little fight that comes along. The same goes with the schools. I went to school here in Boston, and nobody was talking about Negroes and busing us around. The Negroes were there in Roxbury and we were here.

Everybody can't live with you, can they? Everybody likes his own. But now even the school people tell us we have to have our kids with this kind and that kind of person, or else they will be hurt, or something. Now how am I supposed to believe everything all these people say? They weren't talking that way a few years ago. The governor wasn't either. Nor the mayor. They're all just like cattle stampeding to sound like one another. The same with those people out in the suburbs. Suddenly they're interested in the Negro. They worked and worked to get away from him, of course, and get away from us, too. That's why they moved so far, instead of staying here, where they can do something, if they mean so well. But no. They moved and now they're all ready to come back--but only to drive a few Negro kids out for a Sunday picnic. Who has to live with all this, and pay for it in taxes and everything? Whose kids are pushed around? And who gets called "prejudiced" and all the other sneery words? I've had enough of it. It's hypocrisy, right down the line. And we're the ones who get it; the final buck gets passed to us.

Can we really solve the racial problem in this country without coming to terms with the worries and fears of this woman? There is an unnerving thread of truth that runs through her remarks. She and her husband do indeed have cause to worry about jobs and money, even as Negroes do. It is quite true that our newspapers, our churches, our political leaders have changed recently. Because they have learned new social concerns does not mean that the people who for years followed their leadership can fall in line easily, particularly when there are no concrete, persuasive reasons for them to do so. Moreover, the rivalrous and envious observations made by the people I have quoted ring sadly and ironically true: there is a certain snobbish and faddish "interest" in Negroes from people who would not think of concerning themselves with those many white families who share with Negroes slums, poor schools, uncertain employment--the parade of crippling events that make up what "we" so easily call "poverty" or "cultural disadvantages." . . .

If such people are frustrated, then so are we--the comfortable, well educated, and secure. This nation has yet to settle upon a policy that would aim to distribute fairly our astonishing wealth, including all its surpluses and potential productive capacities. Do we need wars and military spending to keep our economy going, or can it be harnessed to provide the schools, houses, hospitals, and just plain food and clothing that millions of us need and don't have? Until such problems are solved, the bitterness and resentment we see between whites and Negroes will continue, and perhaps increase--a reminder of man's devious ability to conceal his real struggles, and thus remain at their mercy.

Robert Coles, "The White Northerner: Pride and Prejudice," Atlantic Monthly 217 (June 1966): 53-57.

Chicanos on the Move (1979)
As the twentieth century neared its close, Hispanic-Americans began to emerge as the United States' most numerous ethnic minority. They were predicted to outnumber blacks by the 1990s. Within that group, which included many Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Latin Americans, the largest single element was made up of Chicanos, or Mexican-Americans. Newsweek magazine painted the following profile of the burgeoning Chicano community in 1979. In what ways are Chicanos similar to other ethnic minorities in U.S. history? What, if anything, is different about their situation?

They are neither here nor there exactly--both immigrant and indigenous, tenaciously Mexican yet indisputably American. They have been part of this country as long as the Southwest that bears so much of their imprint, but they have been invisible to most of their countrymen, shrouded by their own language and culture. Now, they are growing and flexing, solving the riddle of their dual identity and marching into the American consciousness--on their own terms. "We are just beginning to become aware of ourselves and the power we represent," says Houston community leader Héctor García. The result of these stirrings may well be a phenomenon unique in the American experience--a vast Mexican-American population that is, in effect, a nation within a nation.

The single most compelling fact about chicanos is that there are a lot of them--officially 7.2 million, a 60 per cent increase since eight years ago. They are concentrated in the five-state "Tamale Belt" of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas, near the Mexican border that yields a fresh flow of about 1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, every year. One in four Texans is Mexican, and one in five Californians. Los Angeles, already the second largest Mexican metropolitan area in the world, will probably have a chicano majority within twenty years, and California, the nation's largest state, will have a chicano-dominated "majority of minorities" at about the same time. By then, too, the entire Hispanic-American population, three-fifths of it Mexican-American, will surge past black Americans to become the biggest U.S. minority.

Influence and Anxiety

The Mexican presence permeates the Southwest, in place-names, architecture, food and, increasingly, the arts. The hundreds of huge, colorful murals in East Los Angeles have become a tourist attraction . . . while "Zoot Suit," a play by Luis Valdez based on a Los Angeles race riot, is headed for Broadway. Individuals are making their mark in business and entertainment, and, over-all, their numbers are large enough to command the interest of politicians like Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown. But their growing presence in the Southwest is also stirring anglo anxiety about an alien tide pouring into the country, competing for jobs and straining public services. "Anglos are afraid," says California Assemblyman Richard Alatorre. "They think they will get to be the minorities and we'll be opposing them."

The Mexican emergence is marked by a determination to enter mainstream America without becoming assimilated by the anglo culture. Theirs is a special situation among American immigrants, nearly all of whom crossed an ocean to get here and rarely looked back. But Mexico is a familiar reality for chicanos, and the constant border traffic reinforces their ties to the homeland. As a result, it has taken until now for many chicanos to decide that this is their country, too. "What we are saying is that we want to be here, but without losing our language and our culture," says news executive Daniel Villanueva of KMEX-TV in Los Angeles. "They are a richness, a treasure that we don't care to lose."

A Lack of Clout

For now, Mexican-Americans must overcome a slew of other problems: poverty, poor education, urban gang warfare, police brutality and discrimination. The problems seem all the more intractable because chicanos have remarkably little political clout and few political leaders. No chicanos hold statewide elective office in California, and there have been no Mexican city councilmen in Los Angeles since Rep. Edward Roybal (one of four chicanos in Congress) left for Washington in 1963. Mexican-American Governors Raúl Castro of Arizona and Jerry Apodaca of New Mexico, both elected in 1974, are no longer in office. Perhaps the best-known chicano, labor leader César Chávez, has shunned urban politics, preferring to organize migrant farm workers.

There has been a growth of grass-roots political groups like COPS in San Antonio and UNO in Los Angeles that combine the organizing tactics of the late Saul Alinsky with the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In San Antonio, the result has been a substantial boost in chicano political power. But elsewhere, turnout at the polls has been dismal. "You go to a black community and you get a strong bloc vote," says Los Angeles political activist Frank Casado. "You go to East L.A. and you get nothing. Half are illegal and the other half don't vote."

Contrary to popular perception, only 8.5 per cent of chicanos are farm workers. Four out of five live in cities, and many of them are poor. The median family income for Mexican-Americans is $11,421, as opposed to $16,284 for non-Hispanic families. Nearly 19 per cent live below the poverty line. Much of their potential lies in their youth. Close to half are under 18 and the median age is 21.3, compared with 29.5 for the total population. But only 34 per cent of Mexican-Americans over 25 have completed four years of high school and about a quarter of them have less than five years of schooling.

The statistics tell only part of the story of La Raza, a people who are basically conservative, hardworking, religious and family-oriented. They live largely in barrios--Mexican neighborhoods--and seem to like it that way. "The country is a melting pot, but you see blacks, Italians, Hispanics wanting to stay together," says David Lizárraga, executive director of The East Los Angeles Community Union. "That pluralism is the strength of our nation. It isn't racist. It's just comfortable." Even well-to-do chicanos are often reluctant to leave the barrio. Cecilia Casteñeda, 29, a painter whose father moved the family to the suburbs when she was a child, recently moved back to the barrio. "I want my children