January 22, 1974
Page 211
CONFIDENCE IN GOVERNMENT
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, early last month the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations published the results of a public opinion survey conducted for it by Louis Harris & Associates on the state of citizen regard for and involvement in government at all levels. The study, which showed a disquieting public isolation from Government and a strong desire for greater citizen participation in public affairs, has provoked a great deal of comment in the press and substantial interest from citizens, scholars, and Members of Congress.
Two commentaries made last month deserve wider circulation. One was the column by James J. Kilpatrick in which he called the survey "must reading" and observed, in relation to its findings:
Some entirely new forms of education, have to be developed. Public officials tend to communicate through the media, by mail, by individual conversations, by giving speeches, even by going to funerals. Plainly this isn't enough. If three quarters of the people feel they don't know what's going on in state government, someone in state government – and some of us in the media – are doing an inadequate job.
In a lengthy television discussion of some of the survey's findings, the noted anthropologist Dr. Margaret Mead said that Americans' loss of confidence reflects "distrust based on a desire for trust." Dr. Mead speaks of a world in "extreme transition," of "a failure to change when change was due" and of an America which has not yet recognized its new needs. Her comments are extremely provocative and worth our consideration. I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Kilpatrick's column and a transcript of Dr. Mead's talk with Martin Agronsky be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Washington Star-News, Dec. 14,1973]
CRUSHING VERDICT ON WATERGATE
(By James J. Kilpatrick)
Several months ago, a Senate subcommittee retained Louis Harris Associates to make a massive study addressed to this question: How do the American people perceive their government? Last week the answers were in: The people perceive their government poorly.
Their disenchantment extends not only to government, but to other institutions also. By a substantial margin, the people believe the whole "quality of life" in America has decreased in the past 10 years. Their sense of alienation gets worse, not better.
For any person interested in public affairs, this Harris survey has to rank as must reading. It is not pleasant reading. Those who have responsibilities in government, in education, and in the media will read this report in dismay. At the White House, they will read it in shock.
The study provides a crushing verdict on the damage done by Watergate. Asked to express an opinion on 22 American institutions, the people ranked the White House dead last: only 18 percent of the respondents voiced a "great deal of confidence" in the President. Their disenchantment reached to the federal government generally: More than half the people – 57 percent – said they have less confidence in federal agencies today than they had five years ago.
The Harris pollsters have been measuring these attitudes for some years. Their findings must be accepted as reasonably accurate reflections of opinions that are widely held. Seven years ago, only 26 percent of the respondents agreed with the test statement that "people running the country don't really care what happens to you." Today that figure has soared to 55 percent. Seven years ago fewer than half the people (45 percent) accepted the cynical observation that "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Now that belief is voiced by 76 percent. Compared to 1966, three times as many Americans now feel "left out of things going on around you."
Among the most distressing aspects of the survey is the disclosure that millions of adult Americans know little about the people and the institutions that make up our government. While nine out of 10 respondents could name their state governor, only 59 percent could name one of their U.S. Senators and only 39 percent could name both. Astoundingly, only 62 percent knew that Congress is composed of the Senate and the House. One fifth of them – one fifth! – had the foggy notion that Congress includes the U.S. Supreme Court as well.
What emerges from this disturbing survey, among other things, is the urgent need for better communications between government agencies and the people they serve. Only 40 percent of the people feel reasonably up to date on what is going on in federal and local government; only 27 percent feel well informed on state government. Perhaps as a consequence, they regard government at every level with increasing mistrust.
Public officials themselves, who also were sampled by the Harris survey in a companion study, are convinced that they are doing a steadily better job. They know, as best they can know these things, that the quality of public servants in state and local government is better than it was some years ago. They are mystified that the people do not perceive the improvements around them.
How can confidence be restored? Some entirely new forms of education, communication, and public relations may have to be developed. Public officials tend to communicate through the media, by mail, by individual conversations, by giving speeches, even by going to funerals. Plainly this isn't enough. If three quarters of the people feel they don't know what's going on in state government, someone in state government – and some of us in the media – are doing an inadequate job.
I offer no easy answers. The loss of confidence is so deep, and so pervasive, that only a sustained and dedicated effort will reverse the trend. Such an effort will have to be made across the board – in business and industry, in the media, in the churches, in our institutions of higher learning, in organized labor, in every significant part of society.
Such an effort, properly mounted, would not fail. As the Harris survey makes clear, the people still have hope; overwhelmingly they believe that government "can" solve the problems that afflict us. The disenchantment is not irreversible. But hope is a tender flower, needing constant care, and this hope has gone untended far too long.
TRANSCRIPT OF TELEVISED INTERVIEW OF DR. MARGARET MEAD BY MR. MARTIN AGRONSKY, ON "EVENING EDITION," OF THE EASTERN EDUCATIONAL NETWORK, BROADCAST BY WETA-TV, CHANNEL 26, WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 13, 1973.
Mr. AGRONSKY. Good Evening. A recent Lou Harris Poll says that Americans have lost confidence not only in their government leaders but in the fields of medicine, education and organized religion. Our government is racked with scandals and the country faces an energy crisis, rising unemployment and inflation. It's hard these days to do anything viewing our times through a glass darkly. But is everything really that bad?
Well, tonight our evening edition is a discussion of the state of society with a distinguished anthropologist, Dr. Margaret Mead. Dr. Mead has studied seven primitive societies and written over eighteen books and she is currently possessor of the formidable title of Curator Emeritus of Ethnology of the American Museum of Natural History and eminently qualified to provide some perspective on where we are and where we're going. . Dr. Mead, we've had such a steady diet of politics and problems, I'm delighted to welcome an anthropologist to see if we can get a different kind of perspective on where we are and where we're going. I'd like to begin with that wonderful stick you came to the studios with that I found very intriguing and I think the audience would like to hear about it. Can you tell me about it?
Dr. MEAD. Well, the only thing anthropological about this stick is that when I didn't like American canes I was willing to go and get one somewhere else.
AGRONSKY. Where did it come from?
MEAD. I bought it in London. It was made for big farmers. English type farmers, you know. Who stand around and watch other people work.
AGRONSKY. And what do you call it?
MEAD. It's called a thumbstick. You just put your thumb in it. I use it as a "V" though to hang 60 pounds on when I have to stand somewhere.
AGRONSKY. I thought it might have come from Ireland, say St. Patrick may have used it to get snakes or something.
MEAD. Probably he did.
AGRONSKY. Probably did. Dr. Mead, what do you make of a society according to one Harris Poll which places garbage collectors at the highest point in public esteem as related to lawyers, doctors, Senators, Members of the House, Presidents?
MEAD. Well, that garbage collector point was created by the poll not by the American public, and I think its very important to realize that. It was a trick, nothing but a trick. After we've said that we have to consider what has happened to this society, how totally corrupt it was becoming from top to bottom. And one of the things we don't know, but it's possible, is that the only way to get rid of this degree of corruption was to have it come out at the top. That is one way in which you may get rid of it.
AGRONSKY. Don't you feel that the polls have demonstrated, if you want to accept the polls, that Americans are losing faith in just about everything?
MEAD. I think Americans have been living a life that was exceedingly selfish, devoted to their own private enjoyment, independent of what was happening to the rest of the world, and I think that the amount of corruption in this country has been dreadful. You have supermarkets that would rather have two million dollars worth of stuff stolen than have three more people work to help somebody find something. You have an insurance business that never bothered to study thefts, just pay them off and then if you had too many things stolen they took your insurance away from you. At every point in this country, we've had people who would rather spend money than care about human beings and were pretty careless about the way they were spending it.
AGRONSKY. Then you feel that public corruption, if you like, as we have now seen it demonstrated, political corruption, is a mirror in which we can see the face of our society?
MEAD. Well, I think that in the last twenty years this country has been specializing in a way of life that at every point it did not beget any kind of confidence in anyone. And then we've found embezzlers come out of the church, embezzlers come out of medicine. Think of a country where you have to pass a law that permits a doctor to treat a sick person, because he is so likely to have a malpractice suit against him if he does – brought by the legal profession that is there to protect justice. Now, that is a sample of where we'd be.
AGRONSKY. What do you think has happened to our society to bring all this about aside from these points that you make of the selfishness of a – sort of pervasive lack of morality – if you like, an unwillingness to do anything with vision that is constructive? What is it? What's happened to us?
MEAD. I think – you know – first we had a terribly dull era after the war, and countries do after a war; they put forth a great deal of effort, industry put forth tremendous efforts to end the war. To hear them talk now it would take them 10 years to turn around, when in the war they would have turned around in 3 months. We were tired, and people went back to their own private affairs, and we had no sense of urgency or danger and everybody got married and got a station wagon and moved to the suburbs if they could, and those were the Eisenhower years.
Then when Kennedy was elected, there was a lift, and people began to feel maybe we were going to do something at last. And then of course when he was assassinated, that downed the hopes of the young people very much. Because they had an idea that Kennedy was about 20; and then, of course, came the Vietnam War, a war we should never have fought and a war that couldn't possibly put the country back up. And to have a war that you're not back of, that people don't believe is right is the worst thing you can do to a country.
And then came the increasing corruption and the increasing change and then with the President's second term, we were more or less faced with the possibility of everything we've built up since the New Deal being torn down.
AGRONSKY. How do you see that?
MEAD. Well, look what has happened to the country. Housing, any new housing was dead. The President was impounding funds that Congress voted to clear up water pollution for instance.
After all the years where we've had an Administration that proposed and Congress cut the funds you know and got penny-wise or over-political, we had a Congress that had been elected specifically to deal with some of these issues and at the time of the election we made Congress more liberal, hopefully more responsible to the country, and then the President was just disregarding everything they wanted and he reversed it. They proposed things, and he said, "I won't."
AGRONSKY. Yes, but you can't exactly take the blame off the shoulders of the Congress. For example, in the last nine bills of this Congress that were vetoed, they only passed one of the nine over the President's veto and that was the War Powers Act.
MEAD. I'm not taking any blame off the Congress. All I'm saying was that when you say what's happened that we've got a situation which was a reversal of what we were used to and we got presidential policies that apparently were going to go headlong, disregarding anything anybody wanted. You know, I'm not saying what Congress wanted was fine, I'm just saying they were used to having a little bit of power and it has all been taken away from them.
AGRONSKY. Dr. Mead, I'm appealing to you for a little illumination, many of us are puzzled about what went wrong. Where did that worm get into the apple of our society?
What happened? I want to try to induce you to carry us outside the sort of contemporary events and give us a little perspective, historic perspective. Do you think one is available? A moral perspective. Do you think that matters?
MEAD. I don't think that the world has ever faced the present situation. We have faced over and over again societies that haven't the will to save themselves, that weren't able to read the signs of times that didn't see what they were doing and fell.
AGRONSKY. But what happens, why does it happen in a society? You know one studies Gibbon's classic, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"; one can see the decadence set in, one can see the selfishness, if you like, the absolute disregard for the masses of the people. The aristocracy that took advantage of everything that was there. But we don't see that kind of an analogy in this society do we?
MEAD. I don't think the analogy to Rome is worth much except plumbing. We are both preoccupied with plumbing, but Rome was an Empire with barbarians all around ... but if you leave that out we have a situation that the world's never had before, and I wouldn't say decadence so much as obsolescence.... This country is totally obsolescent at the moment. It was one of the first countries to develop a democratic form of government. Seems the agrarian era doesn't suit us now. First country to have public education throughout, look at our schools; first country to develop mass production and look at us, we can't even produce a car to new specifications. This was one of the first countries with a great railroad system, we've let it go to pieces. We had great cities in this country, we've let them rot.
AGRONSKY. These are observations, I want reasons.
MEAD. Now wait a minute – obsolescence always occurs to the people who start things first. Look at British industry and look what state it was in the 20's. That was the first country to industrialize and it got stuck. Getting stuck in one's previous inventions is one of the commonest things that countries do.
AGRONSKY. The inventor of the industrial society that today its Prime Minister had to come to the House of Commons and say that they've got to go on a three-day work week, predict that it would cause enormous unemployment. What's happened there? What's wrong with our society?
MEAD. Obsolescence again. A failure to change when change was due. Germany was bombed to bits and had to start over. They're getting along much better and so.
They've got problems of inflation – we knocked the Japanese out. They have enormous problems of inflation. We can produce but we can't control it, any of us.
None of them have yet discovered that we are living in one world from the standpoint of energy, from everything that we are connected with. We're in a period of extreme transition, and one of the things we are suffering from is the fact that we haven't recognized it yet. But another thing that we are suffering from is that we are obsolescent. We let ourselves build a society entirely on the motor car, and it depends on oil, and now we are stuck. We let our railroads go to pieces; we let our public transport go to pieces; and we've wrecked our cities.
AGRONSKY. Well, but there's a defect, I think, in that argument, in that, quite right, we built our civilization on oil; we have too many automobiles; we've used too much oil, all that is true, but at the same time, had we chosen to use our vision, our industrial vision, had we chosen to use our brains in a scientific capacity all those substitutes for oil were always available and there were energy substitutes always available, there was a lack of vision really, I mean. Granted we made a mistake in the beginning, it's all correctable, don't you think?
MEAD. It is correctable. What we need now is some vision. The hope is we never worked in this country. We never work without a crisis, and most countries don't really pull themselves together nationally without a grave danger. Mostly they pull themselves together for war.
AGRONSKY. Is that a defect of our system?
MEAD. No, I thing that is a fact about countries, about nation-states, that only when something they care about is deeply in danger, that when you feel you are attacked, have they been willing, have people been willing to give up their private lives for the public good.
AGRONSKY. Have we arrived at that point yet?
MEAD. Well, we've arrived, but we don't know it yet. You see we are working on the silly little Christmas tree lights and remarks about "Just cut down your Sunday driving, and don't visit your mother-in-law so often" – we haven't faced the fact that we are in a worldwide situation where life has to be transformed. You know, you talk about the unemployment we're facing – if we get to work and build decent railroads again, freight cars, decent cars, we could transform our society. We wouldn't have to put all of those people out of work. At present we're dealing with nothing but cheap policies, we're saying we won't ration. Nobody wants the political onus of rationing. So what are we going to get?
The oil states put severance taxes on their oil wells and tax the rest of the country. We can't meet this unless we meet it first as a national crisis and then a recognition that this notion that we are going to be independent of the Arabs ... We ought to be independent of the kind of society we've built, independent enough so we could build another one.
AGRONSKY. So what you are really asking is for a fundamental change in our philosophy. You ask for fundamental change in our values, you ask for a fundamental change in our whole concept of what we want out of life. Is it possible?
MEAD. No, I don't think so. I think the reason is that when you get a poll of the American people they still have their fundamental values when they're pushed to the wall. The rest of the time, they aren't noticing. And they still do believe there ought to be leadership.
They still believe that they ought to be able to trust the medical profession. They still believe these things. What they are registering is distrust based on a desire for trust.
AGRONSKY. You've always been deeply concerned about youth – what's happened to youth in our society? You know youth is not merely young people, like youth on campuses. Those who are supposedly in training now to take over the leadership when the older generation steps aside are not very visible today. They don't seem to be involved. Some people say they're apathetic; some people say they don't care; some people say that they have different values; some people say that they've changed their minds about whether they can do anything about government. They don't want to try anymore; they don't want to go into the streets. What's happened to youth? What do you see?
MEAD. Well, I think what happened was that when we had these big explosions, these were the oldest members of the new generation and they arrived on the campus and looked at what a mess we were making of the world. And they said "Goodness, we have to do something about this, this minute, and there's nobody but us." So we had all this instant solution – confrontations. Now the oldest members of the post-war generation are 27. They are out in society. They are the people that started the public law firms and the public advocacy firms. They are the people who tried to revive the whole medical profession. They are the people who are working out in the free clinics. They are in every high school in this country. So that youngsters coming on the campus today don't feel they have to do it now. There are people out ahead of them, and they also have discovered that it didn't do much good. It did some good – shook the colleges up a bit, but the real job is out in the world and you can only do it if you've learned something.
AGRONSKY. Well, then you see in the attitude of youth, a positive and a constructive hope for the future if I understand you correctly.
MEAD. Yes I do. If they have some leadership. But you see I think one of the things that. depressed them enormously, was to realize that no matter what they did or said or thought, the President of the United States had said he was not going to be influenced. And he didn't care what they thought. Under the Johnson Administration when they were doing most of their highest amount of demonstrating, they found that people did care what they thought. So that kind of behavior just wasn't getting them anywhere and so they're taking a more long-term view. But their goals are the same and their ideas are the same, they are not apathetic.
AGRONSKY. Do you think they are better than the generations that preceded them?
MEAD. Well I think they're every bit as good and they are going to be a lot better trained because they are going to have time to learn something.
AGRONSKY. Do you think they are more aware?
MEAD. They have more radical ideas and they understand ...
AGRONSKY. How do you define radical ideas?
MEAD. Well, radical ideas in the sense they indeed think that our society needs transforming, absolutely transforming.
AGRONSKY. How will they go about it?
MEAD. Well, they are there now with an 18-year-old vote for anyone who can take national leadership and talk about what this energy crisis really is and what we've got to do and will have the courage to say this is a time of transition, it’s a time when we are going to learn how to live differently from the way we've been living now.
AGRONSKY. Don't you think that might cut through every spectrum, the whole spectrum of our society, and every segment of society?
MEAD. Yes, but you see, at present you have vast amounts of people who don't vote, who don't participate, people who are in despair, people who are disgusted, and it isn't until we get some national leadership on this whole thing that you are going to cut through that.
AGRONSKY. Well, how do we get it?
MEAD. Well, we get it by demanding it. We get it by your discussing it on this program. The way we get things in the United States is by talking enough, getting the issues clear enough so the people begin to demand all over the country that something be done.
AGRONSKY. Dr. Mead, do you think that we've arrived at a point where people are so aware that the next time we have an opportunity, a crack at national leadership that we will have first class people?
MEAD. The first class people haven't emerged in this crisis yet.
AGRONSKY. That's what I want to know. Where are they?
MEAD. Well, you know, we've got two hundred million people. Now I can't believe that we haven't got, among that 200 million, people who will be capable of leading us. It's nonsense to think that we haven't got them. But we've had a sort of society where nobody wanted that role. And where there was very slight opportunity really. We were dragging through a war that nobody wanted; we were dragging through slow inflation. I think there wasn't anybody who really said completely what could be done. Now we are in the same situation we were in when FDR took over in the Depression.
AGRONSKY. Do you see our new Vice President as a potential leader?
MEAD. I don't think that we have any indication yet.
AGRONSKY. What do you think is going to happen in the election?
MEAD. I don't know what is going to happen in the election. Because what's going to happen in the election is not the real issue right now. The election is quite a way off. The energy crisis is far greater, and it is going to hit us in all sorts of ways long before the election.
AGRONSKY. What our leadership has already demonstrated, they weren't able to anticipate the crisis. What reasons do you have to believe that they would be able to overcome the crisis?
MEAD. Well, I haven't the slightest hope that our present leadership is going to do this.
AGRONSKY. Well, we have our present leadership – we have a democracy.
MEAD. We have plenty of chance for people to emerge who can interpret this.
AGRONSKY. Where are they, Dr. Mead?
MEAD. They haven't emerged. I mean where was FDR when Hoover was having his fling at not saving the country? The leaders come when they get deserved. Now the real question is when the American people are going to deserve a leader.
AGRONSKY. Do we deserve a leader?
MEAD. I think so. Every country gets the leadership it deserves. You know when we have a chance to vote.
AGRONSKY. You demonstrate a rather low opinion of the country.
MEAD. I think the country has been in a very low state. Terribly low state. The utterly unmindful – they've been warned – everybody was warned that this crisis was going to come. They did nothing. They kept driving around in their big cars, one person per car. We watched our cities rot, we watched corruption run through every aspect of the country, and we did nothing.
AGRONSKY. Well, if you feel all this has happened, I wonder where do you get your optimism, your hope that it will be changed?
MEAD. Because of what this country has been able to do before. I mean look at the end of World War II – just before World War II – this country was still in a pretty low state. Half pulled out of the Depression; youth was supposed to be absolutely ruined. You ought to read the things we said about youth then. They would never fight again; they would never do anything for anyone; they had no conscience; they wouldn't sacrifice; nobody would do anything. And then came the war, and we pulled ourselves together.
We did things in three months that we now think would take thirty years to do and I don't think this country pulls itself together unless the whole country faces a common emergency.
AGRONSKY. Do you think that the country now has – one speaks of the country, how do
you speak of a country? Do you think that there is a consensus in the country today that things have gotten so bad that they are no longer tolerable, that they will do something about it?
MEAD. Well, I don't think they would have done a thing without the energy crisis. But, this brings it home to every single person, every household in this country and we either are going to set everybody against everybody else and pilots will have a strike and wreck the airlines. This is the only thing they can think up to do. The truckers block the highways. One state is against another. Now at present we have not sensed that this is a national emergency.
AGRONSKY. How would you evaluate the collective intelligence of the American people? You know, I have in mind that extremely cynical and sardonic observation that H. L. Mencken once made – "Nobody ever lost a nickel underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
AGRONSKY. How do you feel about that? Are we different?
MEAD. We're one of the most intelligent publics in the world, we're one of the best educated. If you compare the American voter in 1940 with the American voter now, he's had far more education. We've got the media where we never had them before. People are 100 times better informed than they were in 1940, and I think the American public, the American people, have everything they ever had. Now this is the real question ...
AGRONSKY. I can only think of the old gag, you know. If everything is so good and they understand so well, why is everything so bad?
MEAD. Well, because we never act except in a crisis, and we haven't had a crisis, we've just had creeping corruptions, and creeping inflation and creeping trouble and rotted our cities, and each person has been trying to do what they thought was best for their families.
AGRONSKY. So, if you were to view the world or at least our society and our knowledge and our concept of what's wrong on a graph, you see it go up and down like that. We just never go like that. We've got to be down before we go up.
MEAD. Well, so far. Now this is a new situation. It isn't the war. It isn't a depression. It isn't a physical disaster, which is what we might have had, you know. We might have had an inversion and killed a million people before we woke up. Instead, we've had an oil shortage to wake people up which I think is much better. It doesn't kill people, and its going to wake them up.
AGRONSKY. You end as an optimist, Dr. Mead.
MEAD. Yes.
AGRONSKY. Thank you very much for a very interesting insight into the problems of our times. Good night for Evening Edition.