Of Crisis and Confidence

Shaken severely by the three Furies of Watergate, inflation and energy crisis, large numbers of Americans have lately lost faith in their leaders and institutions. The people are looking inward--to community, family and self --and discovering a new spirit of self-reliance. Yet by demonstrating their disenchantment with their public officeholders--large numbers of whom will surely be turned out this fall--the people are also creating a power vacuum at the national level. Says Bill Moyers, the former presidential press secretary who now travels the length and breadth of the land to find material for his weekly television journal: "I find the country up for grabs."

Unquestionably, public confidence in authority has sunk. Last week Pollster Louis Harris reported that people surveyed in January had an even lower opinion of Congress than they did of President Nixon, whose popularity has been at an all-time low for months. Harris found 69% of Americans thought Congress was doing only a "fair" or "poor" job. In an earlier survey, 68% of those polled expressed similar negative feelings about Nixon. Says Harris: "The federal establishment looks paralyzed, inept and impotent. In ten years of the Harris survey, confidence has never been this low before."

For the first time in decades, too, once self-confident Americans are growing pessimistic about their personal welfare. In a survey for TIME last November, Opinion Analyst Daniel Yankelovich reported, 72% of the public thought that national affairs were going "very badly" or "pretty badly," but some 90% said that all was "very well" or "fairly well" with their personal lives. Now, chiefly because of rising prices and the fuel shortage, Yankelovich estimates that only 50% to 60% still have the same sense of personal well being. Surveying 500 families in the Chicago area, the Exchange National Bank discovered that while 61% said their financial situation was the same as or better than a year ago, only 11% thought it would improve by the end of this year.

Harris reports that more than half of Americans (up from 45% last fall) believe that the quality of life in the U.S. has deteriorated over the past ten years.

His surveys find that not more than 20% of the public go along with the proposition "We have been through bad times before, and things will once more return to the way they used to be." California Pollster Mervin Field assesses the public mood as one of "muted outrage, semi-shock--if not full shock --numbness, perplexity." Typically, a bewildered airline executive in Manhattan complains: "My salary has doubled in the past five years. I can't ask the company for more, they've been good to me already. But I can't keep up with expenses. The 1930s were pretty bad and we were poor, but at least the price of apples stayed the same."

Some citizens seek escape in the wave of nostalgia for the 1950s or earlier. By the millions, they crowd into movies like American Graffiti and The Sting. They enthusiastically applaud the Andrews Sisters, the World War II singing sensations, whose songs are hot again and who will open on Broadway next month in a musical, Over Here!*

Others are turning to fundamentalist churches like the Southern Baptist Convention. New York Rabbi Balfour Brickner explains: "People are desperately looking for something to cling to when all other models and molds have been shattered." Still others seek relief in the occult. "Magic and the occult can explain the unanswerable and give the person a sense of control," says Drexel Institute Sociologist Barbara Hornum.

Many Americans are falling back on a devil theory of sorts, or at least some sinister force, to explain the nation's problems, or simply personalizing problems with a vengeance. Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard notes: "Devils are being found in the oil companies, the presidency and others to whom blame can be assigned."

The failure of the nation's leaders to demonstrate that they are in control of the various crises causes some political scientists to draw an analogy with the early 1930s. "We've got a deep sense of inadequate leadership," says Harvard Political Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, "so once again it is a ripe time for a charismatic leader." It seems doubtful, however, that America will turn to a demagogue for salvation. Men on horseback have never done well in the U.S., and there is nobody tall in the saddle in sight.

Of the public's response to the current combinations of crises, Princeton Historian Eric Goldman says: "This kind of malaise atrophies the will of the people. They tend to turn in among themselves and say, 'I'll take care of my family's concerns.'" In many ways Americans are drawing inward and becoming more conservative in their career goals, their finances and their politics. Some examples:

>College students are flocking to vocational and preprofessional courses, while enrollments in the humanities continue to drop. Robert Sexton, an administrator of the University of Kentucky, says: "Today's students have lost the 'service' orientation that was generated in the early '60s and have turned to more self-interested goals." At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, Political Scientist Nelson Polsby finds students more realistic and less radicalized than they were five or ten years ago, but also less optimistic.

He explains: "It takes an enormous amount of optimism to be a radical."

>Investors are turning from stocks to tangible goods like gold, silver and jewelry. The price of silver has more than doubled in the past year, to more than $5 per oz. Prices of new gold jewelry at Tiffany's have climbed 35% in the past year. Banks report that demand for pennies has doubled in recent weeks as the price of copper topped $1 a lb.

Speculators hope that the price will exceed $1.45--and make their pennies worth more melted than as money.

>Voters seem to be swinging to the right. There has been a marked increase in the number who consider themselves "conservative," granted that individual definitions of what conservative means vary widely. In 1971, Pollster Yankelovich found that 25% of the public labeled themselves conservative, 55% middle of the road and 20% liberal. By last December self-professed liberals had declined to 17% and those in the middle of the road to 37%, but conservatives had grown to 46%. On campus, the American Council on Education reported this month that its annual survey of college freshmen found that liberals continue to outnumber conservatives by more than two to one. But for the first time, more than half of the freshmen (50.7%) said that they preferred middle-of-the-road political positions.

The crises have eroded support for incumbents in elective office and for the traditional parties. A recent Gallup poll found 34% of those surveyed identifying themselves as independents, up eight points since 1970. Yet, far from turning voters off, the nation's problems have dramatically increased public interest in local politics.

In New Hampshire, 1,126 candidates have filed for 400 seats at the next state constitutional convention; ten years ago, there were so few candidates that 82 people won election with write-in candidacies. At last count 14 candidates were running for Congress from Ohio's 23rd district, near Cleveland. In Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago, town meetings that were once sparsely attended are now overflowing with people. "The cliche is that good government begins at home," says Tom Donohue, chairman of the Winnetka nonpartisan caucus committee. "I think people are beginning to realize that that is true."

There is greater vigor in finding local approaches to national problems because of Washington's failure to act.

Oregon's Republican Governor, Tom McCall, started a gasoline-rationing program, and a dozen states followed with distribution plans of their own. On his initiative, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp stepped in to mediate the independent truck drivers' strike.

Only rarely, however, can a local response to a national problem be wholly adequate.

As President Edward Gels-thorpe of the Boston-based Gillette Co. points out: "The country really has its whole economic structure built on bigness and its whole social-political structure built on a foundation of strong institutions." He adds that the problem with them is not their size but finding ways to make them more honest, efficient and responsive.

Bill Moyers finds the American people alternating "from pessimism to optimism, from resignation to resolution. Roosevelt caused people to really believe that Government was the only way to deal with crises. Now, I think people are beginning to believe that we are better than our Government. That's giving them a sense of pride, although it's not articulated at the mornent."

At this point, perhaps the only surety is that 1974 will be as much a year of profound turbulence for the American economic and political system as was 1973. Pollster Harris finds the American public "in the mood for sacrifice and aching to find things to come together on." But who or what will fill the power vacuum created by the public's loss of faith in national leadership and institutions is still very much in question.

*Jane Sell has taken the place of La Verne Andrews, who died in 1967.

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