Bill Moyers Journal; 306; Reflections on a Revolution; Part 1

You America and America and America and America and America America This was the first official celebration of the Bessentennial at the Concord North Bridge in the spring of 1975.

The President came and spoke of our 200th anniversary this way. In these two centuries, the United States has become a world power. From a newborn nation with a few ships, American sea power now ranges to the most distant shore. Across the river, another generation saw the country differently. The American military stands on the frontline of the country. A few years later, America celebrates. Just what are we celebrating? The spirit of creativity, of innovation, of wisdom, of enterprise, of practicality, and of magnanimity. It had those qualities. Tonight, some personal reflections on the revolution and home warriors.

To the passing eye, America is an impressive sight. A nation of energy and beauty. Rich in resources and people. Growing, changing, moving, and building. But this is a troubled country. Philadelphia, 1976. Seven blocks from where the founding fathers sound the Declaration of Independence. Their descendants stand in line for unemployment checks or walk around the corner and down the street to sign up for welfare. Four times as many people are out of work today than we're living in all the 13 colonies 200 years ago.

More people are on public assistance than we're living in the whole country 50 years after Thomas Jefferson died. For these people and many millions like them, the pursuit of happiness is a promise gathering moss. I've walked out of about 40 or 50 places around town just walking in and out of the apartment storage bank, trying to find something my major. And then after a while after that, I figured maybe I can get stepping stone and try clerical jobs. And you know, even a couple of employment agencies and just know what. I just want to find a job. For people about to celebrate one of history's extraordinary events, Americans are running surprisingly scared. The polls report deep currents of pessimism flowing below the surfaces of the bicentennial and we're no longer sanguine about things we once took for granted. Even down here in my home state of Texas where pessimism used to be considered un-American, the future isn't what it used to be. These long skies and broad spaces up to inspire one of the heroic myths of America, the vision of a manifest bound of destiny.

That vision is blurred now and people no longer speak of it with the same sense of confidence. As a result, the gross national psychology of a once optimistic people has taken a bearish plan. There is a definite feeling of disillusionment. Dr. George Gallup, Dean of American Polsters, talked with my colleague Martin Clancy. As a matter of fact, I think there's never been a time in the 40 years that we have been conducting our surveys that we have found the population to be so pessimistic. You lived through the depression? Yes, I'm under the few. As a matter of fact, we started polling in 1935. And you say the pessimism today is even greater than during that period? Yes, I think so.

When you speak of pessimism above the future, as well as the present, I think that's a fair statement. Most of us are thoroughly entangled in the notion of America that we can't separate our own attitudes and fortunes from the fate of the country. When Dr. Gallup reports of bewildered mood in America, I know what he means. I'm part of it. I find that every day my own illusions are up for grabs, and I'm always discovering that not only are things not what they seem to be, but they were never in fact what I thought they had been. In the 1940s, I spent just about every Saturday afternoon in a movie house like this, watching Lash the Roo, Rory Rogers, Johnny Mac Brown, and the Durango Kid always get their man. Usually they got their woman, too, although not as explicitly as this. I almost ruined my voice as a boy in East Texas trying to imitate Tarzan swinging on a vine toward the rescue of his distress mate Jane, following bloody murder all the time. Now we're told Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crab have never made that noise.

Three men made it, one a baritone, one a soprano, and one a hog collar. This world is hard on believers. Once I was sure I was a Democrat, Democrats were the only people permitted to live in the governor's mansion here in Austin, and just about every kid born during the depression down here was fed a steady died of mother's milk and Roosevelt speeches. But the last time we Democrats held power in Washington, eight years in the 1960s, we left to our successors, a raging war in Asia, an overheated economy, and a fevered body politic. For a while then I thought Richard Nixon would make of the Republicans, what FDR had made of the Democrats 30 years earlier, the dominant power in American politics. Then came Agnew, Watergate, the tapes, and Recession. Now I find myself increasing in sympathy with something Thomas Jefferson said back in 1789. I'm not a Federalist because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any man, whether in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself.

If I could not go to heaven but with a party Jefferson said I would not go there at all. You can't get to heaven with a party today, but you can't get to the White House or even to the Texas State Capitol across the street without one. Yet that's one thing that's troubling Americans, the failure of either party once they gain office to make a real difference. They're adept at winning elections, but that isn't the same as governing the country. Neither party has demonstrated recently that it can use power with self-effacing purpose for the welfare of the country. So it all adds up to ambivalence. And I find myself battered by a hundred new sensations every month, convinced we're either on the edge of the worst of times or the best of times. Like millions of you, I vacillate between the determination to change society and the desire to retreat into it. And I wonder if anyone in this great disputaceous, overanalyzed, over-televised, and under-tenderized country, including myself, knows what the devil is talking about.

This alone seems clear. The system we've created seems beyond the reach of personal will and initiative. Out of control, it threatens to overwhelm the human ends it's supposed to serve. And we're wondering in America today if we reach the limits of social justice, economic opportunity, and official accountability. We started out as a country with seemingly limitless resources and a lot of these small populations. And today we know that we're in an area of very finite resources in our own country and even finite resources throughout the world. So Dr. Richard Morris of Columbia University is president of the American Historical Society. It seems to me that in this bicentennial celebration, the one word that has been lost is the word revolution. I think the revolution is a part of the American dream which holds our society together. The belief in progress, the belief in opportunity, the belief that one can advance. I think that many people still believe in that.

If they've lost the belief in that, then I think the American dream is dying and I would regret to see that. Do you think it is dying? No, I don't think it's dying, but I would say it's sick at the present time. Hard blows struck the dream, the belief in progress and opportunity in the 60s and 70s. Hardly a decade ago, we thought the promise of America was about to be fulfilled. I still remember August of 1963. I came with a friend to the Lincoln Memorial from Martin Luther King's March on Washington. Hundreds of thousands of people representing millions more have been waiting for this hour, some for almost 400 years. I have a dream that one day, one day right now in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. Five years later, a bullet killed Martin Luther King, benign neglect, buried his dream. The 60s became a season for coffins.

Violence is part of our creed. The Civil War killed and named a million men, the United States Calvary wiped out a civilization. The Colts and Wind Chesters are the old frontier or cherished heirlooms and there are members of the National Rifle Association who would rather go to jail and give up their fantasies of manhood.

fantasies die hard. We learned that in Vietnam. We fought there longer than we did in the Revolutionary War and in the end, we left without victory or grace. The horror plagues us still. Long ago, some ancient wise men said, there is nothing which power cannot believe of itself. Well, we modern warning you neither. Cosmic vengeance, a friend said, what a gate in Vietnam were cosmic vengeance, exacted for an original American sin, the sin of optimism. There wasn't anything we felt we couldn't do and nothing we wouldn't do to justify the need for it. I would call the high hopes for America with which we began this second term. I feel a great sadness that I will not be here in this office working on your behalf to achieve those hopes in the next two and a half years.

Something called OPEC dealt our confidence another blow in 1973. It turned off the gushers. From now on, cheap energy, cheap food and cheap goods were no longer a sure thing. At home, the more things cost and everything cost more, the less well they worked, including government. Huge expenditures failed in poverty, arrest crime, stopped the decay of our cities, or even delivered the mail on time. Defense spending soared to $100 billion a year, although no one felt all that more secure. The Americanization of the world was over. Nations clamored now for our weapons, not our ideals, and Uncle Sam was really low on hustling missiles. They were years of catch 22 for real. You voted for peace and got war. You voted for low in order and high officials tried to steal the Constitution. You wrote the protest and a letter came back addressed to occupant.

The toll, a loss of confidence at home, a lack of purpose, a broad, a flagging public spirit. Few people felt it more cutely than the generation that came to majority in the 60s. This is Robert Solomon. He's an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin. He was a student in the 1960s. He found the 60s, it wasn't just a matter of an American dream. Dreams are flimsy. It was much more a matter, I suppose, of just great expectations, frozen food mentality. It's as if you can, the first and cooked dinner in seven minutes, certainly you can have a revolution in seven weeks, perhaps even change human nature in seven months. If you think of some of the songs in the late 60s, for example, Jim Morrison in one song saying, we want the world and we want it now, that's really indicative. It was just a matter of a short period of time until everyone saw the light, and that was it. We found out that not only were things going to be more difficult than that, but there was a well-entrenched opposition, and we hadn't expected that.

When do you think it all began to change? I think I did it pretty precisely in the week of the Cambodian invasion and the Ken State killings. Why is that? I think that was the first time in five years of what looked like of grassroots and fairly easy movement that people started to see that it was going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and rather than face the difficulty people dropped out. It turned into a kind of pessimism that always I think comes when you've got bloated expectations. I think more than anything else, people just sort of turned inside and sort of forgot about the idea of social contract, forgot about the sense of community. The idea was to somehow sort of take care of your own little corner and keep that in order, and the society could just go to hell. That's the veranda from where the President will be able to see the fireworks on the 4th of July. Given the country's mood, they're more likely to be a signal of distress rather than a sign of celebration.

All the bicentennial hoopla doesn't help either. It smacks more of a Madison Avenue conspiracy than an affair of the heart. The bones of a hundred patriot graves must grow in protest every time a big oil company invokes the memory of those revolutionaries who rebelled against a foreign potentate and his tea and trading companies. They were rebels, we ought not to forget it, or play down the fact that rebelled for economic as well as political liberty, the two go together, or were meant to. These men bet their lives on it. But what do we mean today when we say economic liberty? Millions of people can vote who are not economically free. There's an exhibit in Washington in this election year on the importance of voting. It says the ultimate choice, the ballot. That's misleading. What gives you real choice in our society is money. Democracy in effect says equal rights, capitalism in fact delivers unequal results. People with money can buy not only more goods and services than people who don't have it, they can buy more rights.

The dreams and trouble, as Professor Morris says, because we have not yet learned how to deliver both political rights and economic security to people without money. This is one of our basic mythic truths, something we live by even if it isn't altogether so. A century after Lincoln spoke these words, the Supreme Court stated the proposition another way. One man, one vote. However imperfectly it works out in practice, the idea is a powerful incentive to human dignity. It means you matter, but it doesn't put groceries on the table. The United States has 25 million officially certified poor and millions more almost so. Capitalism and democracy don't know what to do with these people, so we give them a dough and hope they'll stay out of sight. In a perverse way, our system does need its poor. Who would do the menial dirty jobs and keep down the cost of living for everyone else? Officially the system also needs its unemployed. Put them to work, the economists say, and they'll drive up inflation. Some paradox. The promise land can't provide all its citizens a job without making our money worth this.

Turn it off. Television, our most powerful teacher, proclaims a primetime message of plenty, while teasing our appetites to confuse wants for need. The next morning, there's the reality again. I got a body shop, I'm not keen and pay my health, because the people came pay for the cars, because they ain't got no jobs, and when is the time to do? I guess I got down the street too, right? All I've been able to do is find the part-time work from time to time, and just enough to barely get by. It's a situation as it's become intolerable. It's hard to make it just two people, I don't see how people do it, but one or two or three children, how they send them to school and keep them in clothes. Especially when I'm playing. I feel sort of almost inferior, I don't know, it's kind of hard to explain, I just feel bad. We feel nothing so keenly today as the loss of human proportion, of a society attuned to human end. The systems taken on a life of its own.

So concentrated and interlocking, so vast and personal and faceless, or the institutions acting upon us, that people brought up on the notion of human uniqueness and dignity, so you were trapped in the workings of an inscrutable machine. The more complex that machine is, the more trivial the impact of a single human being. It's hard for people to be loyal to a society if the society isn't responsive to them. It's one of the reasons why I worry about unemployment. Daniel Bell, the prominent author and sociologist, has written widely about the problems plaguing American society. We talked in the Harvard yard. If people feel somehow that they can't themselves have a stake in the society, they're going to be patinated in that respect, they're going to be estranged, and they're going to be hostile in that way. So that if there isn't that fundamental notion of inclusion, participation, we're in trouble. Now, if you look back at American history, what's striking, we've probably had more violence in this country than any country in the world, labor violence, by 1870 and 1940, and that violence disappeared very quickly.

It disappeared because you had an institution to include people in the society, which is the Wagner Act, collective bargaining. It created a set of matching institutions, grievance procedures, seniority procedures, and the like. In the same way, I think we were beginning to make an effort in the 60s to include blacks, particularly minorities, later, summits and women, but I think this was aborted. So everything became a part of the national awareness, and yet was frustrated because there were no instrumentalities to try to resolve these conditions. Or the instrumentalities which people began building on a kind of responsive basis themselves became aborted rather than work. And one of the things which strikes me as being the most fundamental sociological truth I know is if you can't have institutions with matching new scale, you can afford her and fumble. The founders feared great power in two few hands. They sought to balance political power in the Constitution.

In a colonial economy on a wilderness frontier, they didn't want government to restrain the forces of growth. What they couldn't foresee was the corporate government and labor triumphant that dominates our economy and shapes political priorities to its own ends. Muscle determines who takes on the bacon. If you want a monument to its power, look at what the banks and bond sellers, the politicians and unions, did in New York City. We haven't found a way to cope with their power. As the price fixing scandals and revelations about ITT, golf and pincentral show, as all the special subsidies, depreciation allowances, tax breaks, cost overruns and fraud make clear. These big organizations make up their own rules and pass the cost along to the suckers. Do you swear that all of the testimony you will give in these proceedings will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God. Lockhe does not defend or condone the practice of payments to foreign officials. We only say the practice exists.

This is Daniel J. Houghton for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Five years ago, he got a $250 million loan guarantee for his company from the Congress. Recently, he was back on the hill. What's your kickback? I interpret a kickback as something in the price center to case that you return to the bar and a bribe is to me as where you go to somebody and say, I'd like you to do something for you, for me, and I'll pay you X. Now that's the way it comes through to me. I know authority on these. If you are, I don't know the way. My point is only this. I think it's one you'll have to concede. If you add $100 million to the cost of the sale for purposes of commissions and bribes, then the price of the product goes up at least that much. That's right.

We hope we get it up that much, and we do in most cases. One of the greatest sources of malaise in the country, very widespread, is a feeling of social injustice in the sense that people feel that the wrong people are getting the breaks, getting the rewards. The January Aqualoid is a public opinion analyst and sometimes philosopher who just completed a major study on the attitudes of the American family. He told Martin Clancy what he found. A feeling almost universal throughout the country that the people who live by the rules are getting the short end of the deal and the people who violate all the rules are getting the rewards. When you have that kind of sense of social inequity, you're going to have an erosion of values. They have to be reinforced in order to exist in order to be strengthened. In the past, in just as third Americans, the protests had struggled. They were reppled, remember? They didn't like the way things were, so they set out to change them. If we put the rebel spirit to work this year instead of just celebrating the dead heroes who invoked it, we might put some life back into this country and get control of our fate again.

Democracies become the dullest game in town, a nursing home of old hopes and dreams. In America, strike me as not only baffled, but bored. We've forgotten how much of our history is the struggle of ordinary people to hold and win their rights against privilege. We've forgotten how tough it was. We conjure images of enlightened squares and statesmen holding forth eloquently in Philadelphia and forget the hazards that ensued. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, at least nine were hounded across the country and fear their lives. 14 had their homes burned and destroyed. The families of many were harassed and threatened. We also forget common people sacrifice too. The first to fall in battle were farmers and a schoolmaster from Concord. As the war for independence raged, the seeds for future struggle were sold, land grabbing colonial governors, and speculation, including some among the founders and their friends, prompted Jefferson to predict that from the conclusion of this war, we shall be going downhill. The people will forget themselves, he said, but in the sole faculty of making money.

Actually, the thought of making it so fired the world's imagination that new seekers came in in the streams, looking for their share of the bounty. And we became a very materialistic nation. I think we always were a rather materialistic nation, but I think we were especially so after the Civil War when American industrialization moved at its pace as rapid as any country in the world. The sense of mission became favorited into the notion of manifest destiny that America had a right to expand to the Pacific. And from there, we moved into trans-Oceanic areas with the Spanish-American War, and we acquired overseas possession and we became an empire. Philadelphia 1876, on their way to empire, Americans paused to observe their first centennial. The country was a mixed bag of progress, pride, and plunder. Millions of people poured into Philadelphia for the centennial exhibition. It was gaudy, vulgar, and high-spirited, but so was America. The first marvels of the emerging industrialization were there to behold, from Gothic soda fountains to Bale's new telephone, from hydraulic pumps to huge steam engines.

You could look at these things of iron and steel, of strong metals and their infinite use, and see the national genius taking shape. Set an English journalist inspecting the inventions and machines, the Americans mechanized as the old Greeks sculpted and the old Venetians painted. Outside the exhibition, the country was shot through with violence, corruption, crime, and misery, as many as a million men tramped the country looking for work. In the south, the Ku Klux Klan used murder, arson, and riots to thwart emancipation, and what they couldn't accomplish, the politicians finished off. Outlaws roamed the west, and at little big horn the Sue made one more feudal gesture to stay the coming white hordes. They couldn't be stopped. In the ten years beginning in 1880, more than five million new Americans arrived in the promised land, ending up in places like Kerosene Road, poverty gap, bone alley, and bandits roost. Slum lords made fortunes, while a fifteen-year-old boy could be hung for picking pockets.

The immigrants became industrial serfs in the mines, mills, and railroad shops, or strikebreakers in the persistent drive to smash the union movement. It was a violent period, ranchers and homesteaders fought it out on the frontier. Farmers organized a third party to fight Wall Street control, and reactionary newspapers blamed all the unrest on German communists, ignorant Bohemians, uncouth poles, and wild-eyed Russians. While Eugene Debs was growing up in Terahold, India, horrified by the human cost of industrial progress, Andrew Carnegie was philosophizing in his gospel of wealth. The price which society pays for the law of competition is great, but while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, great inequality of environment, the concentration of power in the hands of a few of the law of competition between these is essential for the future and progress of the race. There was the emerging American ideology, get it while you can, get it any way you can, but above all, get it before someone else gets it first.

Mark Twain, who etched the energy, folly, imagination, and hope of that epoch into our national soul, also saw the roots of something else. The thirst for gain meant expansion, and that meant imperialism with a price. Mark Twain said, we've invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit work. We've debased America's honor and blackened her face before the world. Unfortunately, we aren't reared to think of Samuel Clemens as an outspoken leader of what was then called the anti-imperialist lead. Not only do we dwell on the formation of the granges and co-ops that the farmers founded to fight the banks and railroads. We put their machinery in the Smithsonian Institution, and the memory of their struggle in limbo. It's nicer to look back and see Aunt Holly setting Tom out to whitewash the picket fence with hookpin and Becky Fatcher standing by. Given the coming presidential election, we do well to keep in mind how ordinary folks have stirred the grassroots from the 1890s forward.

When you talk about the American millions cherish, it was their struggle that produced the shorter work week and into child labor, social security, a minimum wage law, public education, suffrage, and ultimately the standard of living that enabled our parents and grandparents to look up from their toil and begin forming their own conclusions about the good life. But they had to fight for it. For a long time, our textbooks ignored the brawling, bloody, bludgeoning part of our history, just as many folks preferred ignore the dark side today. My generation, perhaps, were the roses of all rose-colored glasses.

We were first-class citizens in the American Century, and in Texas, where I grew up, the road to the Bountiful Destiny ran to the state university, the mecca of Texas drivers. On this bottom of bright June day in 1956, the president and chairman of General Dynamics, our commencement speaker, spoke the prevailing gospel. The future of freedom, equality, and liberty, he said, would be decided on economic battlefields. But he assured us we would win, and he said he could find no evidence of despair or cynicism anywhere in American society, only the expectancy of good. So it was. You need to have been alive then, to have been young, ambitious, and born on the white side of the tracks, to appreciate just how rich with promise the fifties were. Our parents had been through depression and war. They had headed the scarcity and sacrifice. Now they wanted the good life, and so did we, their progeny. It was there to have. Norman Vincent Peele preached it. Marilyn Monroe fantasized it for us. A new fangled device called television advertised it.

The most unusual and exciting feature ever built into any refrigerator. It's something that you'll find in no other refrigerator, not one in the world. And here it is. It's an automatic twin juice founder. It serves delicious fruit juice freshly mixed at the touch of a finger. And a man named William Levitt took the good life to a long island potato field, and homogenized it. Every other industry is affected. There are more refrigerators, more dishwashers, more washing machines. Strangely enough, more automobiles. If you have houses you've got an automobile along with them. And so on and so forth, right down the line. It's a good, healthy thing. And this country never had a worry about production. We've solved that. Sociologists called it the age of affluence. We remember it as the age of exuberance. We had the world by the tail. And America was inexhaustible promise. The fifties lived it up. At Texas University, the good life didn't cost very much in the fifties.

The tuition was $40 a semester. A newly married couple going to school together to find an apartment for $40 a month. And although most of us had the work card to make ends meet. There was always time on Saturday afternoons to feel the tribal loyalty stirred with every 40 yard throw. The world was supposed to be living under the shadow of the H bomb with communism and capitalism locked in mortal conflict. What we cared about was the conflict and memorial stadium between the long horns of Texas and the razor backs of Arkansas. There was another side to all this. Texans were supposed to stand ten feet tall, one ranger to arrive. If individualism were the American characteristic, we should have been the roughest, toughest, non-conformist of all. But we weren't. The Korean War, Joe McCarthy, the hounding of dissenters were issues for the very, very few true individualists on campus. Patriots were people who didn't disagree. Blacks were barred from the promised land.

Women still confronted a nagging double standard. Four out of five women told Dr. Gallup that a wife's adultery was more to be condemned than a husband's. And the exodus to the suburbs would leave our inner cities pleading for their own martial plan. What mattered to most Americans was the boom of prosperity in a very short period of time. Within 30 years after the end of World War II, we were eating better, wearing better clothes, and enjoying more rights and privileges than any mass of people in history. You could sum up the whole era in one word, more. The people wanted it. The politicians promised it. A strong United States means a country of sound domestic economy. It means a country that holds this place in the forefront of industrial production and continues this leadership in creating the techniques of abundance. Personal income is the highest ever. Home building is booming. Steal output, new construction, employment. Everywhere there is growing economic strength.

Ladies and gentlemen, things are good and getting better every day. Every dollar released from taxation that is spanned or invested will help create a new job and a new salary. And these new jobs and new salaries can create other jobs and other salaries. And more customers and more growth for an expanding American economy. We can see in a abundant America where science and technology have been fully harnessed to the needs of all of our people. We can see over there in America where our cities are not a problem, but a glory. We can see a compassion in America where no one is ill without hospital care, Medicare, and no one is in trouble without help. I think that's the kind of an America you want, isn't it?

We wanted it, but where we prepared for what came with it. The congestion, pollution, and chaos of millions of Americans chasing their wants were a recipe for frustration and conflict. We kept bumping into each other going to the same place at the same time. And as prosperity abounded, no one wanted to be left behind. Everything got thrown into the part at once in a very short period of time. And it was hard for people to sort it out. And as a result, it became sort of overwhelmed. I think what you have is a revolution of rising entitlements and suddenly the lack of resources, partly lack of planning to resources to meet these things. So you suddenly have problems of health costs, housing costs, environmental costs, all parting up on one another. And these are the ingredients for a real fiscal crisis. We already see it in many areas. The way people feel today is the government isn't performing well. That it is sopping up our tax dollars, charging us enormous amounts of money and not delivering the goods. It's not that people don't want the services. They feel that they're paying for something that they're not getting.

Vast resentments arose when government tried to help the poor catch up. And when many of the efforts failed to accomplish all they seemed to promise, American politics came to an impasse. Old liberals rung their hands and called for more grants in government. New conservatives lectured that the pursuit of equality would end in bankruptcy. They said if the poor would only lower their expectations while capitalism got on its feet and the economy started growing again, why in just a few years the benefits would be trickling down. But things have changed. A lot of Americans aren't sure they want to grow so fast again. And others, they're not so sure we can. But if you would have come from a far away planet and studied America and then come back to your lunar tribe and reported what you found, you would have reported that this society has been geared best to the production of material objects during the day and the destruction at night. Amataya Zioni of Columbia University is director of the Center for Policy Research. He's one of many observers who feel that Americans have started to look at their lives differently.

More and more Americans, not just a few hippies or kids, who are no longer absolutely sure that they want to lead a life devoted to working hard during the day so they can use a lot of material objects after the day or their family. From the very beginning, the nation has consisted of people who always wanted more. Are you saying now that more is no longer and can no longer be the watch word of American society? No, but one of the things will happen. We face a choice now. We can either keep meaning by more more material objects and then certain things will follow or will have to redefine what we mean by more. More could mean more of our human needs, but not necessarily fulfill them with gadgets, with electrical toothbrushes, with packaged martinis. More could mean more time for myself, more could mean more times my family, more time to read, more time to reflect, more time to enjoy the sunset, more traveling in a space.

So more will have to start to mean possibly, more satisfaction, but not necessarily the life of material objects. What used to give meaning to life has come into question. We've been told for the last 80 years that if you're going to have a bigger car and a very thin television set and a boat and a refrigerator with salutes, then you will have the good life. And people, especially those who got there, and especially the children, say, you know what? It ain't so satisfying. While some people question the value of what they have, millions more have too little. If we don't grow, what happens to the casualties of that stalemate? All to talk about belt tightening could give the future to the strongest, push back the middle class, and ruin the poor, unless we find a way to grow without ruining the earth, and to share better the great wealth we have. In a self-centered age, wanting leadership that makes no more than marginal demands on our energies and money, it's hard to recall the revolutionary memory.

Well, if from some distant Olympia, a voice said Richard Morris, this is Thomas Jefferson, how fair is my revolution? What would you answer? I would say, Tom, I think you're in some trouble. Perhaps not deep trouble, but obviously trouble. It's quite obvious that there are a lot of people in this country who are not willing to regard the American Revolution as I think Thomas Jefferson did as a continuing commitment. And feel that the revolution happened, the revolution was accomplished, now let's go home and forget about it. I think, to that extent, that we have unfulfilled commitments. And that concept, I think, is one that a lot of people today, I think, have failed to remember and should remember. We still have not completed all of the goals of the American Revolution, and perhaps we never will. Perhaps not, almost certainly not, but our legacy guarantees will try. It's a terrible thing, a revolutionary memory. It means you can never settle for the way things are, and can never have all you seek.

It means living constantly with conflict, crisis, and the hope of renewal. This document expresses the memory we live by. It proclaims the right to change things if we don't like the way they are. That may be the most revolutionary idea of all, and the one most relevant in 1976. The man who wrote those words, built this house. Thomas Jefferson called it Monticello, Little Mountain, after the hill he picked as its site, overlooking Charlottesville, Virginia. I return there one night recently in the company of a man who's been an avid student of Jefferson for over half a century. And no other house would so express his character and his personality. And he would say, beloved, the detail of the busts that he chose, for example, the... He walked in the small study that was part of Jefferson's bedroom. It is extraordinary that the man who built this place, and was the man who made what I sometimes think is the only real philosophical contribution to historical philosophy made in America.

He substituted the future for the past. He believed he knew the past as well as Adams or anyone else, say all deeply versed in the past. These enormous libraries, and they studied incessantly. But Jefferson and many of his followers convinced to use Thomas Payne's term that the American was a new Adam and a new paradise. That here at last, for the first time in all recorded history, man could prove what he was capable of. Here at last, we were free of the tyranny of monarchy, the tyranny of the military, the tyranny of tradition, the tyranny of class, the tyranny of the past, the tyranny of poverty, the tyranny of ignorance. And man was free to show what he could do.

Just look at our problems from poverty and crime and violence to bankrupt cities, to the power of huge organizations, to the loss of human proportion, to the conflict between hedonism and scarcity. What does that revolutionary generation of 1776 have to say to problems like these? Well, one very elementary thing it has to say is that it had its own problems. Every generation thinks its problems are the gravest, the most insoluble in the whole of history. I'm sure the generation of Chester Arthur and Benjamin Harris and thought those problems were insoluble of a magnitude never before faced by man. By heavens, when you think of the problems confronted the new America, the problem of making a nation, no one ever made a nation before, of getting a federal system underway, no one ever made a successful federal system. Problems can be solved if you have the leadership and the will and the magnanimity. Are you saying that between 1776 and 1976, we've lost the magnanimity,

the will and the leadership? Publicly yes. We have another areas. Talent goes where it is rewarded. We have just as many men of talent today proportionately as we ever had. It goes into science, it goes into the arts, it goes into law. Perhaps it goes into business, it does not go into the public enterprise. Our society worships at the shrine of private enterprise. Isn't there a danger of expecting too much from ideas that belong to an agrarian, colonial, frontier, wilderness society? Of course there is. You don't go back to the particular ideas. You go back to the attitude of mine and the spirit that found those solutions that entertained those ideas. What was that? The same kind of talent that could solve the problem, let us say, of how to deal with the West. Should today be able to solve the problem of how to deal with the rest of the globe?

What was its characteristic? Its characteristic was first, I think, a readiness to serve public welfare. Second and in some ways its most exciting and most tragic sets of posterity.