America's Upbeat Mood

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during five years and seven months in office was to sleep more than any other President," Mencken wrote later.

"The itch to run things did not afflict him; he was content to let them run themselves .. . So the normalcy that everyone longed for began to come back in his time, and if he deserved no credit for bringing it in, he at least deserved credit for not upsetting it." The late 1950s and early '60s, between the wars in Korea and Viet Nam, may be the most recent analagous period. McCarthyist fury had faded. The U.S. was prosperous. Wrote Historian Samuel Eliot Morison: "[Eisenhower] took over the presidency at a time of malaise and hysteria; he left it with the country's morale restored."

That contentment lasted no more than a decade. The '60s rather quickly became unsettled—politically, culturally, morally, every which way. The war in Viet Nam dug deep divisions in society and permanent ly changed the terms of American patriotism. A national self-doubt, for all its cleansing effects, became chronic and corrosive. "From 1965 on, our levels of confidence in America took a precipitous drop," says Sociologist Lipset of the body of survey data. "Every time a new President was elected there would be a blip up. But basically, it was a decline that was precipitous."

As disagreement over the war grew more ferocious, partisans on both sides thoroughly politicized patriotism: antiwar sentiment tended to slip easily into a vulgar anti-Americanism, and "Americanism" meanwhile became synonymous with intolerance of dissent. National pride was not easy. "Sure, there were achievements in the field of civil rights," says California Assemblyman Tom Hayden, a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society. "But significant numbers of Americans could not feel proud about an Army that began to occupy Viet Nam, burn villages and send back veterans hooked on drugs. There was more than a decade during which it was hard to identify positively with what this country had become." Just when U.S. troops finally left Viet Nam, Watergate cracked open. A numb, stony cynicism took over, and even to many apolitical Americans, patriotic sentiment had come to seem anachronistic and nasty. The country was tired and deflated.

By many reckonings, the U.S. has now simply embarked on an overdue stint of R. and R. Political Philosopher Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University says, "A nation needs to rest. Watergate, Viet Nam—they took a toll on the American spirit, and you can't begrudge its time of rest." The respite offers a chance to reflect on the considerable achievements of the civil rights, environmental and feminist movements, among other things. "It's arguable that we have been through the most radical redefinition of the role of the individual in our society," says Middlebury College President Olin Robison. "When we get through this, we pull up short and say, 'Look, there's a lot that's right about our society.' " The replenished American spirit, as it pokes to the surface, tends to have a patriotic look. Yet even Hayden, the erstwhile radical, believes that is O.K. "I think that when you peel away all the hype," he says, "there is still a natural, cultural need to feel good about one's country."