THE MOOD: 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!*