The People: Not Great, But Good

The memo that crossed Lyndon Johnson's desk sounded a disturbing note. Written by an aide who had just returned from a tour of the West and Midwest, it reported that the Great Society has yet to kindle any great enthusiasm in the nation as a whole. "People just aren't going to get excited or go crusading for an antipollution program, for beautifying America, even for bettering its educational standards," warned the aide. Most Americans endorse these goals, he concluded. They just don't get stirred up by them.

The President—who last week added yet another worthy program to the package by signing the Arts and Humanities bill in the Rose Garden of the White House—might well have wondered why this was so. The likeliest answer is that life in the prosperous U.S. of 1965 seems vastly better to most Americans than the flawed society often pictured by Lyndon Johnson in support of his legislative program. At times during the 1964 campaign—and even since—L.B.J. sounded as if he had been handed an old F.D.R. speech by mistake: People were hungry, old folk homeless, farms drying up; children were going without schooling, grownups without jobs.

"Perhaps the major danger today is only that we will be catch-phrased and crisis-mongered to death," writes Ben J. Wattenberg, a 32-year-old native of New York who has collaborated with former U.S. Census Director Richard M. Scammon on a book called This U.S.A. To be published next month, it is a product of 18 months that Wattenberg spent analyzing findings of the exhaustive 1960 decennial census, with Scammon's expert guidance. The book's refreshing and detailed conclusion is that the current proliferation of "capital-lettered afflictions" is largely a mirage. Wattenberg writes: "There is a balanced, historical view available that can better tell us where we have been, where we stand, and hint at where we are going. The approach is not nearly as melodramatic, to be sure, but it has a redeeming feature: it comes closer to the truth." Highlights of Wattenberg's U.S.A.:

> Hard-core poverty statistics are misleading, since the accepted criteria (less than $4,000 a year for a family or $2,000 for an individual) classify as poor many elements of the population, notably students, servicemen and many small farmers, who live reasonably well. Many of those who are considered "impoverished" today are clothed, housed, fed, educated and entertained (TV in 93% of U.S. homes); hunger and exposure have "statistically disappeared" as causes of death in the U.S.

> At most, there are 600,000 married men with families in the U.S. who can be classed as longterm, hard-core cases of unemployment. Though the commonly cited figure for the jobless is nearly 5,000,000, among them are close to 1,000,000 youths under 24, more than 2,000,000 "short-term" jobless and many others who are seeking only part-time work.

> The population explosion is more myth than menace in the U.S. Since World War II, the nation has experienced a modest growth of 18% per decade, one-half what it was 100 years ago—and right now the birth rate is declining.