This Noble Land (9 page)
Authors: James A. Michener
In a period of major political change when national priorities are being redefined, we must not use the need for adjustments as an opportunity to knock the blacks even further down the socioeconomic ladder.
1. We must all assume responsibility for solving the most difficult problem in race relations: how to provide employment opportunities for young black men in the seventeen-thirty age bracket, particularly in the inner cities. We must not humiliate African American youth by punitive measures that attack women and children and diminish even further the chances young black men have for finding employment. For the safety of the nation our young African American men should be kept in jobs, not in jails. Employment for young men is a major factor in strengthening
black family life. I sometimes fear, however, that the evils of the abandoned center city cannot be solved without a major modification of the entire economic system, which is unlikely, but I also know that some rectification is absolutely necessary. To ignore the present injustices is to invite later retaliation as world history demonstrates.
2. Wise leaders among us—economists, political leaders, social planners and dreamers of a better day—must be challenged to find solutions, and any committee directed to assume the responsibility must include ample representation of blacks and other minorities.
3. I see the need for some new type of affirmative action that avoids those parts of a quota system that have enraged many white workers who feel disadvantaged because blacks received preferential treatment. How this can be achieved with fairness I do not know, but I do know that start-up black businesses deserve help in their competition with whites’. I am also convinced that such public services as the police and fire departments must have a representative proportion of black members, and I hope this could be ensured by the pressure of public opinion rather than by numerical quotas. Common sense could be the guide. But in an impasse, or when gross abuse can be proved as in the case of the electrical union that had never admitted a single black, I would want the courts to impose a temporary quota system, which would last only until the gross imbalance was corrected. I believe the public would support such an imposition.
4. Many thousands of women on public assistance are producing illegitimate children, the new crop of babies who will likely spend a good part of their lives on relief. Somehow this constant replenishment of relief cases must be halted. Certainly when
more than 50 percent of black babies in an area are born out of wedlock, something very wrong is taking place. I cannot favor the draconian proposals for stemming this tide that are being circulated at present—they penalize the children and their mothers without solving anything—but effective programs must be developed to reestablish the black family.
I have studied the problem of illegitimate children in many different societies, and it is quite clear that they can thrive, despite moralistic attacks and the pressures of local prejudice. But I am also certain that it is better for a child to be born into and raised by an orderly family. I do not praise illegitimacy, but I salute the numerous young people who survive it remarkably well. I can speak with some authority on the subject, because I have never known what my parentage was; I was raised in a family that had no man on the premises. The three sisters who cared for me—one a nurse, one a school principal, one a loving, caring woman who bound us together—were better and stronger than many fathers in the area. Nevertheless, I am strongly in favor of the traditional American family. Statistically it is the preferable solution, and our black population would be better served if it could move in the direction of the stable family. But for this to happen, there must be jobs for the fathers.
5. We should mount a national program to encourage black families to adopt black babies. And we should halt the ridiculous propaganda from black social workers who claim that only black families can adopt black babies. Along with Oscar Hammerstein, I served on the board of Pearl Buck’s Welcome House, an orphanage specializing in the placement of half-caste babies, especially black Asian, usually in the homes of white families, and we had conspicuous success. In fact, we almost never had a failure, and we had the same good luck with the all-black orphans we
placed in all-white homes. I understand the cultural basis for the rule that black babies must go only into black homes, and I can see why adult black social workers would try to enforce that rule, but I fear they do so for their own personal reasons and to the detriment of the black orphans.
6. I repeat, contentious race relations may be the most serious threat to the stability of American life. Anything we can do to achieve reconciliation must be done.
T
he problem explored in this chapter was illustrated in newspaper articles about three significant interrelated events in America’s economic life. The first was headlined:
JOB CUTS AT AT&T WILL TOTAL
40,000. The second announced that Wall Street was so excited about AT&T’s move that the Dow Jones industrial average rose sixty points. The third development appeared in the day’s quotations, which showed that AT&T’s common stock had also jumped upward 2⅝ and that the company was responsible for 7.6 index points in the Dow.
The meaning of this news was easily deciphered. First, the company had discovered that it could wind up the year with a better bottom line on profits if it got rid of its marginally surplus workers. Second, the stock market’s exultation in the prospect of AT&T’s growing profits took precedence over all else, including the fate of company workers and their local economies. Third, the rise in AT&T’s stock meant that American business approved of the drastic cuts in personnel, because investors who held the stock would probably enjoy an even greater increase in the value of their holdings. It was, all things considered, a banner day for American business.
But there was gloom among the forty thousand employees who found themselves without jobs on the third day of the new year and with dismal prospects for replacing them. Belatedly, we
are beginning to realize that such cuts are going to hit even families whose incomes range in the $70,000–$120,000 bracket. And if the husband does find a job, it will be at a salary much reduced from what the family was accustomed to. In that case, the wife, if she is not already working, must also go to work to contribute a second salary. A deplorable result is the latchkey child, who finds no one at home when he returns from school. Families in this group are severely hurting, with many unable to afford to send their children to college.
News about the downsizing of companies has become common in recent years, and its significance is always the same. Like AT&T, the overall American economy is doing fine, but its employees are not—their earnings are not even keeping up with inflation. The nation’s total income is rising, but 97 percent of the increase falls into the hands of the wealthiest 20 percent of the population. Money is
not
‘trickling down.’ The spectacular rise in the Dow Jones industrial average means that citizens who already possess wealth and have it wisely invested have grown richer. The stock market directly affects only a small percentage of the population, although added wealth injected anywhere in the economic system occasionally produces some carryover to the general population. But the basic truth of a rising stock market today is that the rich become richer playing games in the market while the poor remain where they were or become even poorer. The joy of the man who profited from the rise in the Dow Jones should not blind us to the grief of the man of fifty with a family to support who is suddenly without a job.
I am reminded of that universal truth voiced by Oliver Goldsmith:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
Changes in American life during the past three decades seem to prove the accuracy of the poet’s lament. During recent years my attempts to help friends find new jobs have accomplished little, and at the same time I see that my graduate students who are soon to enter the labor market view with apprehension their chances of finding jobs commensurate with the years they have spent preparing for them. I do not find, in American life generally, much awareness of the tragedy of unemployment. We commiserate with the homeless and weep for the young people dying of AIDS, but we do not allow the brutal facts of mid-level unemployment to sink into our conscience. Another of Goldsmith’s couplets is equally applicable to the situation:
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.
The economic revolution of recent times has gone far toward destroying our ‘bold peasantry,’ among them the factory worker who has spent years building his skills and his value to his company but who now finds he is no longer needed because his factory has fled either eastward to Asia—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea—or south to Mexico. If this drift continues much longer, I can foresee only a radical redefinition of American life.
The closest historical analogy to our perilous position today is found in sixteenth-century Spain, which ruled much of the world and controlled not only the rich Iberian Peninsula but also much of central Europe, including Austria and the Netherlands. Commerce flowed freely among this group of nations; industries in one country balanced and supported those in another, and there was a rich symbiotic interrelationship. But what impresses me most about Spain in those days was that it had one of the strongest peasant cadres in the world, stalwart men and women who had mastered agriculture, wine making, leather curing, iron
fabrication and the sensible harvesting of forested lands. In 1520 they excelled in all these fields and had established a high standard by which workers in other countries were judged; cordovan leather, a Toledo blade and sherry wine were known and treasured throughout the civilized world. Spain stood preeminent in the stability of its national economy, its good government under the Hapsburgs and its military genius.
In the Spanish colonies of Peru and Mexico, the conquistadores discovered silver and gold. Yearly caravels from Peru began to sail up the Pacific coastline to Panama, where mule trains hauled the precious metals across the isthmus to be loaded onto the great treasure fleets that crossed the Caribbean and Atlantic with the treasures from Peru and Mexico, depositing them at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.
What this newfound wealth from the colonies did was to flood the economy in Spain with unearned currency. Prices for everyday goods skyrocketed and the peasants were diverted from their normal tasks. Spaniards now bought things instead of making them. The thrifty farmers no longer worked their fields. Much of the mineral wealth mined in Peru and Mexico passed quickly through Spain to finance its endeavors on foreign battlefields. The decline of Spain began with this ungoverned influx of unearned wealth, which caused the trades and industries on which Spain had depended for her greatness to fall into disuse.
France and England were fortunate that in neither their homelands nor their colonies did they discover gold. There was no sudden bonanza within their economies; the peasants continued to harvest their fields and the workmen to pursue their trades. They enjoyed a slow, orderly and controlled growth, and within a century both nations were much stronger than profligate Spain, whose flood of unearned income brought it to stagnation, if not to ruin.
Americans should study the Spanish phenomenon—falling from supremacy down to third-rate in one century—because we are making the same errors that weakened Spain. The gold and silver mines that we have discovered are the factories in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mexico. They make the consumer goods our once famous factories no longer bother with. Like sixteenth-century Spain, we buy the goods we want from abroad and allow our bold peasantry to languish without jobs. We are able to purchase so much from abroad because our tax system has constantly enriched our upper classes so that they can afford the foreign goods.
Visit my street in a typical American suburb. Parked in the driveways are cars and small trucks made in Japan. In my house the sound system that plays the music I love is totally Japanese. I’ve tried other makes and they cannot be relied upon to function more than half a year; the Japanese electronics go on forever, and if replacement parts are ever required, they are available and easily installed. My closet is filled with all kinds of clothes made in East Asia at bargain prices; my shoes are from either Spain or Asia. My tennis shoes are from Taiwan, as are my caps, emblazoned with the names of professional U.S. sports teams. My electric lights are made abroad, as are my inexpensive bedroom clock radios. My little camera is foreign-made, as is the film I use. My neighbor has a wonderful video camera for making movies and, minutes later, showing them on a family screen. Both the camera and the screen came from Japan. I sometimes feel that anything I pick up in my home will bear, on scrutiny, the label
MADE IN JAPAN
. O
r MADE IN TAIWAN
,
MADE IN KOREA
.