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                                                                              ╚January 5, 1970

Man and Woman of the Year: The Middle Americans



     The Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed
defiantly in a school on Netcong, N.J., reading the morning
invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state
legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to
put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law
absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In
Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor.
Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriots. Their
car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their
ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the
freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or
Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and
two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and
afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared
with the menacing confusions of their own society.

     The American dream that they were living was no longer the
dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to
lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over
-- the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a
communications industry that they often believed was lying to
them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of
Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated
them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality.
Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in
waves, bearing some of their children away.

     But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were
"discovered" first by politicians and the press, and then they
started to discover themselves. In the Administration's voices
-- especially in the Vice President's and the Attorney General's
-- in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in
a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim
their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that
brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal
from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they
influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation,
and this began to shape the course of the nation and the
nation's course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were
the Middle Americans.

The Battleground of Change
     "Some say that you can't rationalize the plight of the
kids," observes the Hudson Institute's Frank Armbruster, "you
have got to feel it. The same thing is true of Middle America;
you have to feel it. "The Middle Americans cherish,
apprehensively, a system of values that they see assaulted and
mocked everywhere -- everywhere except in Richard Nixon's
Washington. "This," they will say with an air of embarrassment
that such a truth need be stated at all, "is the greatest
country in the world. Why are people trying to tear it down?"

     Middle Americans both physically and ideologically inhabit
the battleground of change, and they feel themselves most
threatened by it Taxes hit them the hardest, and yet they feel
that they have less and less voice in where and how their money
is spent. The Woman of the Year, perhaps even more than her
husband, senses the chaos. Often enough, inflation determines
the diet she feeds her family. She is anxious about safety in
the streets. She worries about her children being bussed, about
the sex education to which they are subjected, the drugs they
might pick up at school, the smut for sale on the drugstore
newsstand and the neighborhood movie screen. For too long no one
has seemed to care about the Middle Americans' concerns. They
have felt ignored while angry minorities dominated the headlines
and the Government's domestic action. If not ignored, they have
been treated with condescension.

     Paul M. Deac, executive vice president of the National
Confederation of American Ethnic Groups, which says it
represents 18 million foreign-born and first- and second-
generation Americans expressed the especially virulent outrage
of the poorer Middle Americans. "The professional liberals let
the genie out of the bottle -- racial hatred, lawlessness,"
says Deac. The backlash today is not so much against blacks per
se, or against black militancy and the white intellectuals: "The
Moratorium was a stab in the back to our boys on the firing
lines. Our families don't have long-haired brats-- they'd tear
the hair off them. Our boys don't smoke pot or raise hell or
seek deferments. Our people are too busy making a living and
trying to be good Americans."

Heroes and Villains
     The gaps between Middle America and the vanguard of fashion
are deep. The daughters of Middle America learn baton twirling,
not Hermann Hesse. Middle Americans line up in the cold each
Christmas season at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall; the
Rockettes, not Oh! Calcutta! are their entertainment. While the
rest of the nation's youth has been watching Dustin Hoffman in
Midnight Cowboy, Middle American teen-agers have been taking in
John Wayne for the second or third time in The Green Berets.
Middle Americans have been largely responsible for more than
10,000 Christmas cards sent to General Creighton Abrams in
Saigon. They sing the national anthem at football games -- and
mean it.

     The culture no longer seems to supply many heroes, but
Middle Americans admire men like Neil Armstrong and to some
extent, Spiro Agnew. California Governor Ronald Reagan and San
Francisco State College President S.I. Hayakawa have won
approval for their hard line on dissent. Before his death last
year, Dwight Eisenhower was listed as the most admired man in
the nation -- and Middle America cast much of the vote. In
death, John Kennedy is also a hero. Ironically, Robert Kennedy
had the allegiance of much of Middle America along with his
constituency of blacks and the young. Whatever their politics,
both Kennedys had an idealism about America, a pride about it
to which Middle Americans responded because they shared it.

     Middle America's villains are less easily singled out.
Yippie Abbie Hoffman or S.D.S. leaders like Mark Rudd are hardly
important enough by themselves to constitute major devils. With
such faceless groups as the Weathermen, they merely serve as
symbols of all the radicals who pronounce the country evil and
ripe for destruction. Disliked, too, are the vaguely identified
"liberals" and "intellectuals" who are seen as sympathizing with
the radicals. Perhaps the most authentic individual villains to
Middle America are the Black Panther leaders, Eldridge Cleaver
and Bobby Seale.

     But there is a danger of over simplifying both the loves
and hates of Middle America. Despite all the evidence of a shift
to the right, Middle America for years -- certainly since the
New Deal -- has been part of the country's basic leftward trend,
and still is. The Middle is located much farther toward the left
today than it was a decade ago.

Defining Middle America
     Who precisely are the Middle Americans? Columnist Joseph
Kraft gave the term currency in late 1967. They make up the core
of the group that Richard Nixon now invokes as the "forgotten
Americans" or "the Great Silent Majority," though Middle
Americans themselves may not be a majority of the U.S. All
Americans doubtless share some Middle American beliefs, and many
Middle Americans would disagree among themselves on some
issues. The lower middle class, including blue-collar workers,
service employees and farm workers, numbers some 40 million.
Many of the nation's 20 million elderly citizens, frequently
living on fixed incomes, are Middle American. So is a
substantial portion of the 36 million white-collar workers.
Although a hard figure is not possible, the total of Middle
Americans possibly approaches 100 million, or half the U.S.
population.

A State of Mind
     The Middle Americans tend to be groped in the nation's
heartland more than on its coasts. But they live in Queens,
N.Y., and Van Nuys, Calif., as well as in Skokie and
Chillicothe. They tend toward the middle-aged and the
middlebrow. They are defined as much by what they are not as
what they are. As a rule, they are not the poor or the rich.
Still, many wealthy business executives are Middle Americans.
H. Ross Perot, the Texas millionaire who organized a group
called "United We Stand Inc." to support the President on the
war, is an example. Few blacks march in the ranks of Middle
America. Nor do the nation's intellectuals, its liberals, its
professors, its surgeons. Many general practitioners, though are
Middle Americans. Needless to say, Middle America offers no
haven to the New Left, although Middle Americans might count a
number of old leftists -- unionists, for example -- in their
numbers. They are not extremists of the right despite the fact
that some of them voted for Gorge Wallace in 1968. They are both
Republicans and Democrats: many cast their ballots for Richard
Nixon, but it may be that nearly as many voted for Hubert
Humphrey.

     Above all Middle America is a state of mind, a morality,
a construct of values and prejudices and a complex of fears.
The Man and Woman of the Year represent a vast, unorganized
fraternity bound together by a roughly similar way of seeing
things.

     The American mood during the past year has been
unquestionably calmer than it was in 1968, which seemed to be
the violent crescendo for the '60s. A new Administration given
to understatement -- on the part of the President if not the
Vice President -- soothed the national psyche. When Spiro Agnew
erupted against television and newspaper commentators and
against dissent's "effete corps of impudent snobs," Middle
America was further comforted -- and also aroused to an
intimation of its own potential strength. The flights of Apollo
11 and 12 were a quintessential adventure of American technology
and daring, the "triumph of the squares" is what Eric Hoffer,
the forklift philosopher and spokesman of the workingman, called
the Apollo program. The astronauts themselves were paragons
of Middle American aspiration. Redolent of charcoal cookouts,
their vocabularies an engaging mix of space jargon and "gee
whiz," the space explorer gave back to Middle America where such
things still matter; that among Neil Armstrong's
extraterrestrial baggage was a special badge of his college
fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. He used it symbolically to
establish Moon Alpha Chapter.

No Clear Victories
     For most of the '60s, the nation was transfixed by its
darker side, as if some impulse of Ahab were obsessively driving
it to a suicidal reunion with an evil deep in its own nature.
The astronauts reasserted the chief mate Starbuck's cool,
professional sanity. Not intellect, but intelligence. Not evil,
but remediable errors, course corrections, chatter from Capcom
to Houston. In the Middle American version, the Pequod steers
for him, Moby Dick is a holdful of whale oil for the nation's
lamps.

     Some liberals grumbled that the Apollo programs $26 billion
would have been better spent on curing hunger or the urban
malaise. Poet W.H. Auden wrote dyspeptically:
     "It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for
     so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
     it would not have occurred to woman
     to think worthwhile, made possible only
     because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
     the exact time . . ."

     Yet Americans, particularly Middle Americans, reveled in
the lunar landings precisely because they were victories purely
accomplished: in Viet Nam, in the various slums, in the polluted
environment, no clear victories seemed possible any longer.

     "To go forward at all," Richard Nixon said at his
inauguration, "is to go forward together." Assuming office
after a year of wrenching passions, Nixon enjoyed a honeymoon
of lowered voices that lasted at least through the summer.
Except for the further radical fringes, antiwar dissenters
wanted to allow Nixon time to make good his pledge to extricate
the U.S. from Viet Nam. The nation had overcommited itself both
at home and abroad, and Nixon took it to be time to stop making
promises, to realign American obligations with the nation's
resources and desires. There are many who feel that America's
problems are so great and urgent that it could not endure an
era of "consolidation." But the Nixon Doctrine appealed to
Middle America.

Contradictory Mixture
     He recast domestic policy, established a White House
Council for Urban Affairs designed to give coherence and
continuity to urban planning. Like most Middle Americans, Nixon
reflected what would have traditionally seemed a contradictory
mixture of liberal and conservative impulses. From a liberal
point of view, the record of Nixon's first year is probably
better than his poor public relations and awkward rhetoric would
indicate. At year's end, the Administration saved its
"Philadelphia Plan," designed to open construction trade unions
to thousands more black workers. His bold welfare reforms for
the first time proposed a policy of guaranteed annual wages
combined with a work incentive. His draft reform, instituting
selection by lottery, brought a new equity to the Selective
Service system. He won liberal applause for ending the U.S.
production of biological weapons and for beginning the Strategic
Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the Soviet Union.

     But Nixon counterpointed such liberal moves with a series
of gestures toward the conservative instincts of his Middle
American constituency. In naming U.S. Court of Appeals Judge
Warren Burger to be Earl Warren's successor as Chief Justice,
he began readjusting the Supreme Court's balance toward a
stricter constructionism. His voting rights bill would have the
effect of weakening the Negro gains accomplished under the 1965
Voting Rights Act. Even though the Supreme Court ordered "all
deliberate speed" in school integration 15 years ago, the
Administration sought to delay the process once again by
allowing some Southern school districts more time to formulate
their desegregation plans. Then the Supreme Court, in its first
major decision after Berger became Chief Justice, unanimously
rejected the delays.

Civics-Book decency
     Nixon was pursing not so much a "Southern strategy" as a
Middle American strategy. The South is only one part of the
Middle America that Nixon has installed in Washington. His
Administration -- with such exceptions as Daniel Patrick
Moynahan and Henry Kissinger -- is like the reunion photograph
of a Depression class that rose to the top by Horatio Alger
virtues. Interior Secretary Walter Hickel arrived in Alaska at
the age of 20 with 37 cents in his pocket. George Romney, the
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is the son of a
Mormon who was driven out of Mexico by Pancho Villa and
supported his ten children for a time as a carpenter in El Paso.

     Nixon himself is the embodiment of Middle America. There
is opportunity for everyone, his mother taught him back in
Whittier, Calif. -- work hard, love your country, never give up.
God likes fighters. Nixon's philosophers are Norman Vincent
Peale and Billy Graham. Like the rest of his Administration, the
President has gone far beyond his humble origins. But Nixon,
John Mitchell and Spiro Agnew minister to and play upon the
discontent of Middle America by conjuring up the imperatives of
discipline and restraint.

     Americans of different generations inhabit the same
continent, but they exist in different eras. The American mind
is, in effect, stretched out over several decades. The radical
young dwell in projection of the 70's. The values of many of
their fathers are the ethics of the Depression, of World War II
or the later 40's. In the imagination of his ideals, the Middle
American glimpses cracked snapshots through a scrim: a khaki
uniform, trousers gathered at a waist; a souvenir samurai sword;
a "ruptured duck"; a girl with Betty Grable hair and hemline;
the lawn of a barely remembered house. The ideological order
that he sees is a civics-book sense of decency. The Depression
taught him the wisdom of accumulation and the fear of
joblessness. He knew from schooling on the G.I. Bill what
education could do and what it meant.

     The Middle American's faith is not merely grounded upon
nostalgia and emotion. He believes in a system that did work and
in large measure still does; a brilliant, highly adaptable
system, heir to the Enlightenment and classic democracy, with
innumerable, ingenious, local accretions. But the country has
become too complex and the long-hidden inequities too glaring
for the system to continue without drastic changes. The Middle
American's education does not dwell upon the agonizing moral
discrepancies of American history -- the story of the Indians
or the blacks, or the national tradition of violence. He quite
sincerely rejects the charge that he is prejudiced against the
blacks or callused about the poor. He cannot believe that the
society he has come to accept as the best possible on earth,
the order he sees as natural, contains wrongs so deeply built-
in that he does not notice them. His sense of indignation is
all too easily served by the fact that so many reformers have
gone beyond the reform as being too slow, and are using methods
ranging from rude to downright totalitarian. The issues that
arouse and haunt Middle America form a catalogue of national
crisis in values:

 --  Race. The rising level of crime frightens the Middle
American, and when he speaks of crime, though he does not like
to admit it, he means blacks. On the one hand, Middle America
largely agrees with the advances toward equality made by blacks
in the past ten years. Says Robert Rosenthal, an insurance
auditor in New York City: "Sure, I know it's only a handful of
Negroes who are causing the trouble. Most of them are the same
as whites." His daughter Nancy, 17, attends a school that is
60% black and she expresses both the adaptability and anxiety
of the Middle Americans: "I always look down the stairway to
make sure no one is down there before I walk. It's not really
bad, except that you can't go into the bathroom because they'll
take your money."

     Middle Americans express respect for moderate black
leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young -- which is easy
enough. Middle Americans would generally like to see the quality
of black education improve. But the idea of sacrificing their
own children's education to a long-range improvement for blacks
appalls them. "They moved to the suburbs for their children, to
get fresh air and find good schools," says Frank Armbruster. But
programs such as bussing "negated all their sacrifices to
provide their children an education."

     Open admissions programs at universities strike Middle
Americans an unfair and illogical violations of the merit
system. Beyond that, they see a bias toward blacks in
conventional admissions policies. "If anything," says Futurist
Herman Kahn, "they believe that a black face helps. A Middle
American can't send his kid to Harvard, but he knows the black
man down the street can, if the boy is bright enough." Middle
American workers frequently feel that blacks are given
preferential treatment in job hiring. Says Harvard Psychiatrist
Robert Coles, who has made a study of the grievances of Middle
America: "They say that the Negro should be given jobs, but only
so long as he does not go faster than they had to go."

 --   Black Militancy. It is the black militants who especially
anger the white Middle. During 1969, job militants at
construction sites in Pittsburgh came up against phalanxes of
hard-hatted white workers determined to prove that they were
capable of counterviolence. "The threats strike me as
blackmail," says Al Breselton, an Atlanta advertising man.
"Negroes have got to confront the white community strongly, but
we had better not be met with shotguns, because we're got a lot
more of them than they have." Without exactly meaning to, white
Middle America rests upon the unspoken threat of sheer presence
and the six-gun deterrent, Gary Cooper's fingers twitching two
inches from his holster. No wonder the Middle Americans recoil
when the twitching fingers are black -- as at Cornell, or at
Black Panther headquarters.

 --  Dissent. Middle Americans associate black militancy with
white students' dissent -- university revolts that the white
middle, brought up to cherish education as an almost sacred
instrument of self-improvement, find incomprehensible. "San
Francisco State is being destroyed by a bunch of crummy punks,"
says Eric Hoffer. "Who the hell would have dreamt that a thing
like this was possible? Ignorant, bedraggled, illiterate punks!
Our institutions are tremendously vulnerable. What are we afraid
of? Of the Government? Of the police? Of Congress? No, for God's
sake, we're afraid of the individual, of the beast masquerading
as man." Some less volcanic thinkers -- among them many liberals
and academics -- have also expressed dismay. All institutions
are fallible, says Columbia University's Jacques Barzun, and
unending criticism can bring down the entire structure of
society.

    No one expresses the ideology of the Nixonian nation on
dissent better than Historian Daniel Boorstin, whose book, The
Decline of Radicalism, Nixon sometimes studies in a secluded den
in the Executive Office Building. For an academic, Boorstin is
almost ferocious about dissent: "Disagreement is the lifeblood
of democracy, dissention is its cancer. Disagreers seek
solutions to common problems, dissenters seek power for
themselves." In a section on the "Rise of Minority Veto," which
must be Agnew's text, he writes: "Small groups have more power
than ever before . . . We are witnessing the explosive rebellion
of small groups, who reject the American past, deny their
relation to the community. This atavism, this new barbarism,
cannot last if the nation is to survive." To that, Middle
America offers a resounding amen.

     Middle Americans believe that the radical young are
operating in a vast misunderstanding of their nation. Brandeis
Political Scientist John Roche tells an anecdote about the
Chicago convention trouble. As he was being collared by a cop,
a dissident shouted: "Long live the dictatorship of the
proletariat!" Raising his nightstick, the cop retorted "I am the
proletariat." Bash, bash.

 --  Viet Nam the war, which has claimed so many of his sons,
leaves Middle American in a moral perplexity. Most probably
agree that the U.S. commitment was a mistake in the first place.
Yet they want "an honorable withdrawal." The idea of a U.S.
defeat troubles them. Edward Looney, a Brooklyn bus driver, lost
a son a year ago; he was killed by a misdirected American
shell. "We may find out some day that what we're doing in Viet
Nam is wrong," he says, "but until then, it's my country right
or wrong."

     The My Lai massacre has only deepened the confusion. Many
Middle Americans stoutly refuse to believe that it even
occurred. This was true of 49% of those polled by the
Minneapolis Tribune last month. When they do believe that the
massacre happened, they attribute it to battlefield error and
not to the malignancy of American soldiers. Middle America
teeters on the edge of a different fear: What of all that death
and maiming were to amount to little or nothing, of so much
sacrifice made no real difference to Southeast Asia, to the
containment of Communism? American sons keep coming homeward in
zippered plastic body bags, and a sizable percentage of
Americans tell the pollsters that they believe Viet Nam will
eventually turn Communist in any case.

 --  Morals. When their own children desert to the
"counterculture" and in effect become strangers, Middle
Americans say in bewilderment, "Either we neglected them or we
spoiled them." A surprisingly large number of Middle Americans
attribute the weakening of the family structures to the fact
that so many mothers have gone to work. In the youthful
disrespect for American institutions they see reflected the
breakdown of their own parental authority, although a great many
still control their children and command their respect.

     The proliferation of drugs seems to the Middle American an
apt metaphor for his sense that American life has grown
contaminated. The spectacle of Woodstock -- quite apart from
the nudity and the mess -- was offensive to Middle America
because it seemed that everyone was dropping something or
smoking something, and the police stood by and watched. At the
same time, the widespread use of marijuana, sometimes by their
own children, is leading many Middle Americans toward a bit more
sophistication, and ability to distinguish between the use of
pot and harder drugs. For some months of his presidency, the
distinction seemed lost on Nixon and his Justice Department,
whose crackdown on marijuana induced a pot famine and sent many
of the young to amphetamines, barbiturates and other more
serious drugs. Said Abbie Hoffman with typical hyperbole:
"Richard Nixon was becoming the biggest pill pusher of us all."
At a WHite House conference on narcotics in December, Nixon
confessed: "I thought that the answer was simply enforce the
law. But when you're talking about 14-year-olds and 15-year-
olds, the answer is information. The answer is understanding."

 --  Inflation. Treadmill inflation has betrayed Middle
America's faith in the work ethic; American affluence seems
indefinitely expandable, all right, but prices expand just as
rapidly, or more so. Last year, despite his wage increases, the
average American worker barely broke even in actual buying
power. Inflation has a profound psychological as well as
material importance, for its stacks the deck against the old
American gamble. The nation has always bet -- with extraordinary
diligence, skill and luck --  the promise of opportunity could
be redeemed, that the nation's natural fertility would justify
the values of hard work and individualism. Now many of the
Middle Americans, who have banked on work ethic, find
themselves in a losing streak with the loser's psychology.

     This feeling is reinforced by an all-around frustration.
"Nothing seems to work properly any more," says Political
Analyst William Pfaff. "Industry makes cheap goods but wrecks
the landscape and pollutes the air and rivers. Technocrats tell
us all problems are solvable, but their submarines sink at the
dock and scientific administrators spill nerve gas onto grazing
lands and then lie about it. Bureaucracies make the system
function, but they meddle in private lives." Telephones don't
seem to work very well. Public transportation grows ramshackle.
The quality of schools declines -- in part because inflation
prompts Middle Americans to vote against school-bond issues,
against one of their own deepest values.

The Politics of Againstness
     Where will the Man and Woman of the Year be led by their
discontent? The left sees the nation already on the edge of a
long night of repression. Nixon, says the left, is subtly
calling forth the night riders. The liberal-oriented National
Committee for an Effective Congress worries that the
Administration is molding the Middle Americans into a
respectable new right based on the militant Goldwater morality.
"The Administration is working the hidden veins of fear, racism
and resentment which lie deep in Middle America," says the
committee in its annual report. "Respect for the past, distrust
of the future, the politics of 'againstness.'"

     Witness, says the left, the Chicago conspiracy trial, in
which seven defendants face possible $10,000 fines and five-year
jail terms for violating a law of doubtful constitutionality.
Or witness what seems to be radicals -- and many others -- to
be a systematic police slaughter of Black Panther leaders. They
point to John Mitchell's wiretapping policies, preventive-
detection program and no-knock raiding techniques. They see
harsh drug laws as political instruments by which Middle
America means to destroy dissent and counterculture. In
Dansville, Va., last July, an 80-year-old judge sentenced a 20-
year-old student to 20 years for possession of marijuana.

     Some Middle Americans doubtless do believe that repression
is the only answer. They were disposed to take Spiro Agnew
seriously when he tossed off his line, "We can afford to
separate them from our society with mo more regret that we
should feel over discarding rotten apples from the barrel." Yet
most Middle Americans would find repression incomprehensible and
intolerable, a violation precisely of the American values they
cherish. Certainly, a species of Know-Nothingism is evident in
the U.S. But, as Harvard's Seymour Martin Lipset points out,
the reaction does not begin to approach the tenor of the 20s,
when many Government leaders preached a blatantly anti-immigrant
racism.

Right or Left?
     In the 20's it was merely the values of small-town America
that were challenged. In the 60s and into the 70s, it is the
nation itself. Americans, almost unique in the world, are
incapable of imagining a different form of government of the
nation. As William Pfaff observes, "The Constitution is all."
Thus, to assault America, to call for revolutionary change, as
some black and white radicals do, is a profoundly spiritual
offense, an invitation to Armageddon. Most Middle Americans,
and most radicals, share one blind spot: they tend to forget
that both the form and content of the U.S. Government has
undergone enormous changes over the years, and that the
Constitution will tolerate much more change without having the
entire system collapse.

     The present shift to the right is in one perspective
illusory. Since the start of the New Deal, the tide of the
nation has flowed to the left. Middle America is now swimming
against the tide in some issues, but the current is likely to
continue, carrying it ever more leftward. The mass of Americans
have grown steadily more tolerant over the last few generations.
One can glimpse the changes in small incidents of the popular
culture. When Ingrid Bergman became adulterously pregnant by
Roberto Rossillini in 1949, she was all but stoned out of the
country. Mia Farrow and Andre Previn, anticipating the joys of
unwed motherhood and fatherhood, have aroused only minor
indignation. Middle Americans accept Bayard Rustin as an
eminently sensible black moderate now, but only a few years ago
they thought him a firebrand. The idea of socialized medicine
gives apoplexy to the patients. Middle Americans have more or
less accepted the principles of guaranteed annual income, of
coexistence with Communism.

     "Recently," says Columbia Sociologist Amitai Etzioni,
"there has been almost unanimous agreement among newspaper
commentators that the country is moving sharply to the right.
These statements are far from accurate." In terms of philosophy,
Etzioni observes, practically all Americans would call
themselves conservatives, favoring more individualism, more
freedom, less government power. But on an operational level, he
insists, in terms of the specific Government policies it will
accept, the country is liberal. According to a study that
Etzioni completed last summer for the Office of Economic
Opportunity, the nation, in operational terms is 65% liberal,
21% middle-of-the-road and only 14% conservative. (By "liberal,
Etzioni means willing to accept government intervention for
specific, progressive social programs.)

     Middle America does not express its likes and dislikes very
well, "It's really too bad that we middle Americans don't have
an articulate spokesman," says Opie Shelton of the Atlanta
Chamber of Commerce. Nixon, Mitchell and Agnew speak to Middle
America, but they are not its leaders. Nixon, in fact, excites
little of the personal enthusiasm the even Agnew can arouse. Nor
does Middle America have any organization. The anti-moratorium
rallies, for example, were largely a failure. For all the great
joiner's tradition in the U.S., Middle America is diffuse and
tends to be private to the point of self-consciousness --
demonstrating is not its style.

To Assist, Not Resist
     Yet the Man and Woman of the Year have, with a new sense
of truculent self-awareness presented Nixon with a special
paradox. According to Etzioni, the issues that have thrust
forward his relatively conservative politics are inflation and
crime. If he solves both problems, the saliency of the issues
will diminish and the voter will go back to attaching more
weight to the liberal issues -- and may vote Democratic as a
result. If Nixon does not redress inflation and cut crime, then
the country may turn even more conservative -- to George Wallace
-- particularly if the Viet Nam War is viewed as a defeat.

     TIME's Washington Bureau Chief High Sidey confesses "the
uneasy sensation that Nixon is riding the crest of the huge wave
called MIddle America, but he is reacting to it rather than
leading it." There is a precedent for that view of the
president. Woodrow Wilson wrote that "the ear of the leader
must ring with the voices of the people. He cannot be of the
school of the prophets; he must be of the number of those who
studiously serve the slow-paced daily need."

     The trouble with that formulation is that America's needs
have long since ceased to be slow-paced or daily. Problems
whose resolution will require years need to be attacked now, the
priorities set and the programs begun. Solving America's most
pressing problems will require the enlistment of Middle
Americans, who live in the thick of them. To denounce the evils
of radicalism is not enough. In the long run, the burden will
be on Middle America to show that nonradical reform can
accomplish what needs to be done. However unfair it may seem,
this will require sacrifices in Middle America's part -- and
on the part of other portions of U.S. society as well. In this
situation, it may be that Middle America will find itself in
alliance with liberals newly awakened to its concern. Many
Middle Americans, listening to the slogans of the farther left,
may well come to prefer liberal formulas.

     If the U.S. is to go forward as Nixon has promised, Middle
America must be led to assist change rather than resent and
resist it, to help shape the future rather than try to preserve
and already vanished America. In that task, a presidential
prophet might find himself surprisingly honored in Middle
American country. The Man and Woman of the Year still want
to believe in America and the American dream. It has dimmed for
too many, sometimes because of their failed expectations,
sometimes because of the assaults on their complacency. Yet if
the dream were to be redefined properly for them, Middle
Americans could again provide abundantly that felicitous mixture
of idealism and sound common sense on which the U.S. was
founded.