The Challenge to American Values

Surely, Americans had experienced a number of things which had caused them to be more doubtful about the strength of their nation and its basic values. A popular President, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in 1963. After his death, the nation under President Johnson vastly increased the number of American troops in the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam. Johnson did this in order to prevent the Vietnamese communists from taking control of the country. He believed that communism would spread throughout Southeast Asia if it succeeded in Vietnam. By 1966, the struggle in Vietnam had become a major American war.

Most Americans agreed with the action. But even so, there was stronger opposition to the Vietnam War than to any previous American war in the twentieth century. Most of the opponents of the war attacked it as immoral. They believed it was immoral for the United States to try to determine the future of a distant country by means of war. Many opponents of the Vietnam war also attacked the nation's basic values as corrupt. Some of the harshest criticism of the United States and its values by American citizens was heard during this period of protest against the war.

While most Americans strongly rejected this harsh criticism of their nation's values, some observers believe that the anti-war movement made many Americans who supported the war more doubtful about their beliefs. An even greater blow to the majority who supported the war was the fact that the United States failed in its objective. The purpose of the war was to protect an ally of the United,, States, South Vietnam, against defeat at the hands of the communist North Vietnam. More than half a million American soldiers were sent to achieve this purpose, but this was not enough. Rather than send even more soldiers to Vietnam or take the dangerous step of using nuclear weapons, the United States began to bring its soldiers home in 1969.

In 1975 North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam. The result was discourag­ing to all Americans. The opponents of the war continued to feel that the nation had done something terribly immoral. The people who had supported the war were discouraged by its outcome. Most Americans had been brought up believing that the United States had never lost a war. Now it seemed that for the first time, this had happened. Was the nation losing its strength? If it was, was this because it was losing faith in its basic values? These were the kinds of troubling questions Vietnam raised in the minds of many Americans.

Before the Vietnam War was ended, the Watergate scandals involving the next President, Richard Nixon, dealt a second major blow to the confidence Americans had in their nation and its values. Because the President of the United States is supposed to be an outstanding example of the nation's values, the scandals tended to weaken the faith of many Americans in these values. President Nixon was forced to resign from office in 1974. Three aspects of the affair made it the most serious scandal in American history. First, illegal sabotageand -espionageactivities on a large scale were carried out by agents and associates of the President against his leading political opponents in the United States. Men paid by President Nixon's reelection committee were arrested for breaking into the national headquarters of the opposition Democratic party (in the Watergate building) in order to place illegal listening devices on the telephones and to photograph party documents. Second, the President used all the powers of his office to keep law enforcementofficials from finding out the truth about these activities. Third, he repeatedly lied to the American people, claiming to be innocent of all wrongdoing even after the American people had ceased to believe him.

Before the Watergate scandal, American Presidents, even unpopular ones, were thought to be basically honest, law-abidingmen. President Nixon's conduct in office weakened the faith and respect Americans held for their presidents. Faith in American values was also weakened because of the belief that the President is the nation's first citizen and the most important defender of its values. "If you can't trust the President, who can you trust?" was the question on the minds of many.

The failure of the Vietnam War effort and the resignation of President Nixon in disgracedid not destroy the faith of Americans in their values, but the faith seems to have been weakened by these events. After Vietnam and Watergate, a third development appeared, which threatened to weaken the faith even further. This was the possibility that for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s the standard of living of the American people might decline significantly. As noted in Chapter 5, the material abundance of the United States has served as a kindof sustaining food which has kept American values alive and strong. Americans have considered their high standard of living a reward for practicing their basic beliefs in individual freedom, competition, and other values. The possibility of a significant decline in living standards during the 1980s and beyond, therefore, could present a danger to the continuing strength of these values.

In the late 1970s Americans became aware that the era of cheap and abundant energy was ending. In the 1980s Americans also began to discover that the nation's water supplies were declining at a rapid rate and that the amount of land available for farming was also declining as more and more farmland was changed into business and residential neighborhoods. These and other facts pointed to a decline in the foundations of material abundance that the United States had enjoyed throughout its history.

Political events such as Vietnam and Watergate, and probably even more important, the fear that the nation's material abundance may be declining, seem to have made Americans less optimistic about the future of their country. Two experts on American public opinion, Daniel Yankelovich and Bernard Lefkowitz, came to this conclusion after studying the results of American public opinion polls dating back to the 1950s. They observed that during the decade of the 1970s a significant change had taken place "from an optimistic faith in an open unlimited future to a fear of instability and a new sense of limits."*

Because the optimism and continuing abundance which had characterized the United States appeared to be less certain by the end of the 1970s, the basic American values which have been strengthened by them may have reached a crossroads in the 1980s.

A Return to the Past

Faced with rapid change and the fear and uncertainty that go with it, individuals as well as nations sometimes seek to return to the ways of the past as a solution. In the early 1980s the idea of returning to the ways of the past had a strong appeal to many Americans who increasingly viewed their past as being better than their future. Yankelovich and Lefkowitz have observed that until the 1970s Americans generally believed that the present was a better time for their country than the past and that the future would be better than the present; by 1978, however, public opinion polls showed that many Americans had come to believe that just the opposite was true: the past had been better for the country than the present, and the present was better than the future would be.

The popular appeal of returning to the ways of the past as a solution to the problems of the 1980s was demonstrated when Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980. Time magazine chose President Reagan as its "man of the year" and said of him: "intellectually, emotionally, Reagan lives in the past."

One of President Reagan's basic beliefs is that the United States should return as much as possible to its pre-1930 ways. In those times business institutions were strong and government institutions were weak. Reagan believes that the American values of individual freedom and competition are strengthened by business and weakened by government. Therefore, his programs as President have been designed to greatly strengthen business and reduce the size and power of the national government. By moving in this way toward the practices of the past, President Reagan believed that the standard of living of Americans would begin to improve once more in the 1980s as it had done throughout most of the nation's history.