1014

42

The American PeopleFace a New Century

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As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We mustdisenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1862

More than two hundred years old as the twenty-first century began, the United States was both

an old and a new nation. It boasted one of thelongest uninterrupted traditions of democratic gov-ernment of any country on earth. Indeed, it had pio-neered the techniques of mass democracy and was,in that sense, the oldest modern polity. As one of theearliest countries to industrialize, America had alsodwelt in the modern economic era longer than mostnations.

But the Republic was in many ways still youth-ful as well. Innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking—all characteristics of youth—were honorednational values. The twenty-first century began muchlike the twentieth, with American society continuingto be rejuvenated by fresh waves of immigrants, full ofenergy and ambition. The U.S. economy, despiteproblems, was generating new jobs at a rate of some 2 million per year. American inventions—especiallycomputer and communications technologies—were

transforming the face of global society. The wholeworld seemed to worship the icons of American cul-ture—downing soft drinks and donning blue jeans,watching Hollywood films, listening to rock or coun-try and western music, even adopting indigenousAmerican sports like baseball and basketball. In therealm of consumerism, American products appearedto have Coca-Colonized the globe.

The history of American society also seemed tohave increased global significance as the third mil-lennium of the Christian era opened. Americanswere a pluralistic people who had struggled for cen-turies to provide opportunity and to achieve toler-ance and justice for many different religious, ethnic,and racial groups. Their historical experience couldoffer valuable lessons to the rapidly internationaliz-ing planetary society that was emerging at the dawnof the twenty-first century.

In politics, economics, and culture, the greatsocial experiment of American democracy was far

from completed as the United States faced itsfuture. Much history remained to be made as thecountry entered its third century of nationhood. Butmen and women make history only within theframework bequeathed to them by earlier genera-tions. For better or worse, they march forward alongtime’s path bearing the burdens of the past. Know-ing when they have come to a truly new turn in theroad, when they can lay part of their burden downand when they cannot, or should not—all this con-stitutes the sort of wisdom that only historical studycan engender.

Economic Revolutions

When the twentieth century opened, United StatesSteel Corporation was the flagship business ofAmerica’s booming industrial revolution. U.S. Steelwas a typical “heavy industry,” cranking out theingots and girders and sheet metal that built thenation’s basic physical infrastructure. A generationlater, General Motors, annually producing millionsof automobiles, became the characteristic Americancorporation, signaling the historic shift to a massconsumer economy that began in the 1920s andflowered fully in the 1950s. Following World War II,the rise of International Business Machines (IBM)symbolized yet another momentous transforma-tion, to the fast-paced “information age,” when thestoring, organizing, and processing of data becamean industry in its own right.

The pace of the information age soon acceler-ated. By century’s end, the rapid emergence ofMicrosoft Corporation and the phenomenal growthof the Internet heralded an explosive communica-tions revolution. Americans now rocketed down the“information superhighway” toward the unchartedterrain of an electronic global village, where tradi-tional geographic, social, and political boundariescould be vaulted with the tap of a keypad.

The communications revolution was full ofboth promise and peril. In the blink of an eye, ordi-nary citizens could gain access to information onceavailable only to privileged elites with vast librariesor expert staffs at their disposal. Businesspeopleinstantaneously girdled the planet with transactionsof prodigious scope and serpentine complexity. Jap-anese bankers might sell wheat contracts in Chicagoand simultaneously direct the profits to buying oil

shipments from the Persian Gulf offered by a brokerin Amsterdam. By the late 1990s, a “dot-com” explo-sion of new commercial ventures quickly expandedthe market (and the stock-market stakes) for entre-preneurs leading the way in making the Internet atwenty-first-century electronic mall, library, andentertainment center rolled into one.

But the very speed and efficiency of the newcommunications tools threatened to wipe out entireoccupational categories. Postal delivery people,travel agents, store clerks, bank tellers, stock bro-kers, and all kinds of other workers whose businessit was to mediate between product and client, mightfind themselves rendered obsolete in the era of the Internet. And as the computer makes pos-sible “classrooms without walls,” where studentscan pursue learning largely on their own, eventeachers, whose job is essentially to mediate be-tween students and various bodies of knowledge,might well end up as roadkill on the informationsuperhighway.

Increasingly, scientific research was the enginethat drove the economy, and new scientific knowl-

The New Economy 1015

edge posed new social and moral dilemmas. Whenscientists first unlocked the secrets of moleculargenetic structure in the 1950s, the road lay open tobreeding new strains of high-yield, pest- andweather-resistant crops; to curing hereditary dis-eases; and also, unfortunately, to unleashing geneticmutations that might threaten the fragile ecologicalbalance of the wondrous biosphere in whichhumankind was delicately suspended. As technicalmastery of biological and medical techniquesadvanced, unprecedented ethical questions clam-ored for resolution. Should the human gene poolitself be “engineered”? What principles should gov-ern the allocation of human organs for lifesavingtransplants, or of scarce dialysis machines, or ofartificial hearts? Was it wise in the first place tospend money on such costly devices rather thandevote society’s resources to improved sanitation,maternal and infant care, and nutritional and healtheducation? Who was the rightful parent of a childborn to a “surrogate mother” or conceived by artifi-cial insemination? How, if at all, should society reg-ulate the increasingly lengthy and often painfulprocess of dying? What rules should guide efforts toclone human beings—or should such efforts evenbe attempted?

Affluence and Inequality

Americans were still an affluent people at the begin-ning of the twenty-first century. Median householdincome declined somewhat in the early 1990s butrebounded by 1998 to about $39,000. Yet even thoseAmericans with incomes below the government’sofficial poverty level (defined in 1998 as $16,600 fora family of four) enjoyed a standard of living higherthan that of two-thirds of the rest of humankind.

Americans were no longer the world’s wealthi-est people in the 1990s, as they had been in thequarter-century after World War II. Citizens of sev-eral other countries enjoyed higher average per-capita incomes, and many nations boasted moreequitable distributions of wealth. In an unsettlingreversal of long-term trends in American society,during the last two decades of the twentieth cen-tury, the rich got much richer, while the poor got an ever-shrinking share of the pie. The richest 20percent of Americans in the 1990s raked in nearly

half the nation’s income, whereas the poorest 20percent received less than 4 percent. The gapbetween rich and poor began to widen in the 1980sand widened further in the following decade. Thattrend was evident in many industrial societies, but itwas most pronounced in the United States. Between1968 and 1998, the share of the nation’s income thatflowed to the top 20 percent of its householdsswelled from 40 percent to more than 49 percent.Even more striking, in the same period the top 5percent of income earners saw their share of thenational income grow from about 15 percent tomore than 20 percent. The Welfare Reform Bill of1996, restricting access to social services and requir-ing able-bodied welfare recipients to find work,weakened the financial footing of many impover-ished families still further.

Widening inequality could be measured inother ways as well: chief executives in the 1970s typ-ically earned forty-one times the income of theaverage worker in their corporations; by the 1990sthey earned 225 times as much. At the same time,some 34 million people, 12.7 percent of all Ameri-cans (8.2 percent of whites, 26.1 percent of African-Americans, and 25.6 percent of Latinos), remainedmired in poverty—a depressing indictment of theinequities afflicting an affluent and allegedly egali-tarian republic.

What caused the widening income gap? Somecritics pointed to the tax and fiscal policies of theReagan and Bush years, which favored the wealthyand penalized the poor. But deeper-running histori-cal currents probably played a more powerful

1016 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

White

African –American

Asian and Pacific Islander

Latino origin (of any race)

10.5%

26.1%

12.5%

25.6%

Poverty Rates of Americans by Race and Latino Origin,1998 (Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, March CurrentPopulation Survey.)

role, as suggested by the similar experi-ences of other industrialized societies.Among the most conspicuous causeswere intensifying global economiccompetition; the shrinkage in high-paying manufacturing jobs for semi-skilled and unskilled workers; thegreater economic rewards commandedby educated workers in high-techindustries; the decline of unions; thegrowth of part-time and temporarywork; the rising tide of relatively low-skill immigrants; and the increasingtendency of educated men and womento marry one another and both work,creating households with very highincomes.

Richer and Poorer 1017

Who Pays Federal Income Taxes?(share of U.S. income tax, by income percentile)

Income Group (base income shown as of 1998) 1994 1998

Top 1% (above $269,496) 28.7% 34.8%Top 5% (above $114,729) 47.4% 53.8%Top 10% (above $83,220) 59.1% 65.0%Top 25% (above $50,607) 79.5% 82.7%Top 50% (above $25,491) 95.2% 95.8%Bottom 50% (below $25,491) 4.8% 4.2%

Because the United States has long had a “progressive” income tax system, inwhich tax obligations are distributed according to ability to pay, wideningincome inequality was reflected in a redistribution of tax burdens. In thebooming 1990s, the rich did indeed get richer—but they also paid anincreasing fraction of the total federal tax take.(Source: Internal Revenue Service data, Tax Foundation.)

The Feminist Revolution

All Americans were caught up in the great eco-nomic changes of the late twentieth century, butno group was more profoundly affected thanwomen. When the century opened, womenmade up about 20 percent of all workers. Overthe next five decades, they increased their pres-ence in the labor force at a fairly steady rate,except for a temporary spurt during World WarII. Then, beginning in the 1950s, women’s entryinto the workplace accelerated dramatically. Bythe 1990s nearly half of all workers were women,

1018 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

Widening Income Inequality

Share of Aggregate Income 1980 1990 1999

Lowest fifth 4.3 3.9 3.6Second fifth 10.3 9.6 8.9Middle fifth 16.9 15.9 14.9Fourth fifth 24.9 24.0 23.2Highest fifth 43.7 46.6 49.4Top 5% 15.8 18.6 21.5

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the top fifth ofthe country’s households made significant gains in income, whileeveryone else lost ground. (Source: U.S. Census.)

and the majority of working-age women held jobsoutside the home. Most astonishing was the upsurgein employment among mothers. In 1950, 90 percentof mothers with children under the age of six did notwork for pay. But by the 1990s, a majority of womenwith children as young as one year old were wageearners. Women now brought home the bacon andthen cooked it, too.

Beginning in the 1960s, many all-male strong-holds, including Yale, Princeton, West Point,Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, and even, grudg-ingly and belatedly, southern military academieslike the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute,opened their doors to women. Women are nowpiloting commercial airliners and orbiting in outerspace. They govern states and cities, write SupremeCourt decisions, and debate the law of the land inboth houses of Congress. In 1996 women crackedanother gender barrier when they launched a pro-fessional basketball league of their own.

Yet despite these gains, many feminists re-mained frustrated. Women continued to receivelower wages—an average 76.5 cents on the dollar in1999 compared with men doing the same full-timework—and they tended to concentrate in a few low-prestige, low-paying occupations (the “pink-collarghetto”). Although they made up more than half thepopulation, women in the 1990s accounted for only25 percent of lawyers and judges (up from 5 percentin 1970) and 22 percent of physicians (up from 10 percent in 1970). Overt sexual discriminationexplained some of this occupational segregation,but most of it seemed attributable to the greaterburdens of parenthood on women than on men.Women were far more likely than men to interrupttheir careers to bear and raise children, and even to

choose less demanding career paths to allow for ful-filling those traditional roles. Discrimination and afocus on children also helped account for the per-sistence of a “gender gap” in national elections.Women continued to vote in greater numbers thanmen for Democratic candidates, who were oftenperceived as being more willing to favor govern-ment support for health and child care, education,and job equality.

As the revolution in women’s status rolled on inthe 1990s, men’s lives changed as well. A men’smovement sprang up that sought to redefine maleroles in a new age of increasing gender equality.Some employers provided paternity leave as well asmaternity leave, in recognition of the shared obliga-tions of the two-worker household. As traditionalfemale responsibilities such as cooking, laundry,and child care spilled over to men, many corpora-tions sponsored highly popular fatherhood semi-nars and husbands’ support groups. Recognizing

The Women’s Movement 1019

Percentage of Working Married Women withChildren (husband present), 1950–1998

Total No Children Children ChildrenYear Percentage Under 18 6–17 Only Under 6

1950 23.8 30.3 28.3 11.91960 30.5 34.7 39.0 18.61970 40.8 42.2 49.2 30.31980 50.1 46.0 61.7 45.11994 60.6 53.2 76.0 61.71998 61.8 70.6 76.8 63.7

(Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, relevant years.)

the new realities of the modern American house-hold, Congress passed a Family Leave Bill in 1993,mandating job protection for working fathers aswell as mothers who needed to take time off workfor family-related reasons.

The Fading Family

The nuclear family, once prized as the foundation ofsociety and the nursery of the Republic, sufferedheavy blows in modern America. By the 1990s oneout of every two marriages ended in divorce. Seventimes more children were affected by divorce thanat the beginning of the century. Kids who com-muted between separated parents were common-place. The 1950s ideal of a family with two parents,only one of whom worked, was now a virtually use-less way to picture the typical American household.

Traditional families were not only falling apartat an alarming rate but were also increasingly slowto form in the first place. The proportion of adultsliving alone tripled in the four decades after 1950,and by the 1990s nearly one-third of women aged

twenty-five to twenty-nine had never married. Inthe 1960s, 5 percent of all births were to unmarriedwomen, but three decades later one out of fourwhite babies, one out of three Hispanic babies, andtwo out of three African-American babies were bornto single mothers. Every fourth child in America wasgrowing up in a household that lacked two parents.The collapse of the traditional family contributedheavily to the pauperization of many women andchildren, as single parents (usually mothers) strug-

1020 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

In his inaugural address in January 1989,President George Bush (b. 1924) declared,

“My friends, we are not the sum of ourpossessions; they are not the measure of ourlives. In our hearts we know what matters:. . . to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, acitizen who leaves his home, his neighbor-hood, and his town better than he found it.”

gled to keep their households economically afloatand their families emotionally intact.

Child-rearing, the family’s foremost function,was being increasingly assigned to “parent-substitutes” at day-care centers or schools—or totelevision, the modern age’s “electronic baby-sitter.”Estimates were that the average child by age sixteenhad watched up to fifteen thousand hours of TV—more time than was spent in the classroom.Parental anxieties multiplied with the advent of theInternet—an electronic cornucopia where young-sters could “surf” through poetry and problem setsas well as pornography.

Born and raised without the family supportenjoyed by their forebears, Americans were alsoincreasingly likely to be lonely in their later years.Most elderly people in the 1990s depended on pen-sion plans and government Social Security pay-ments, not on their loved ones, for their daily bread.The great majority of them drew their last breathnot in their own homes, but in hospitals and nurs-ing facilities. From youth to old age, the role of thefamily was dwindling.

The Aging of America

Old age was more and more likely to be a lengthyexperience for Americans, who were living longerthan ever before. A person born at the dawn of thecentury could expect to survive less than fifty years,but a white male born in the 1990s could anticipatea life span of more than seventy-six years. His whitefemale counterpart would probably outlive him byseven years. (The figures were slightly lower fornonwhites, reflecting differences in living stan-dards, especially diet and health care.) The censusof 1950 recorded that women for the first time madeup a majority of Americans, thanks largely to greaterfemale longevity. Miraculous medical advanceslengthened and strengthened lives. Noteworthywere the development of antibiotics after 1940 andDr. Jonas Salk’s discovery in 1953 of a vaccineagainst a dreaded crippler, polio.

Longer lives spelled more older people. OneAmerican in eight was over sixty-five years of age inthe 1990s, and projections were that one of everyfive people would be in the “sunset years” by 2050,as the median age rose toward forty. This aging ofthe population raised a host of political, social, and

economic questions. Elderly people formed apotent electoral bloc that aggressively lobbied forgovernment favors and achieved real gains forsenior citizens. The share of GNP spent on healthcare for people over sixty-five more than doubled inthe three decades after the enactment of Medicarein 1965. This growth in medical payments for theold far outstripped the growth of educationalexpenditures for the young, with correspondingconsequences for the social and economic situationsof both populations. As late as the 1960s, nearly aquarter of Americans over the age of sixty-five lived

Demographic Patterns 1021

1,600

1,500

1,400

1,300

1,200

1,100

1,000

900

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

0

Billions of dollars

1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 ’95

Government Expenditures for Social Welfare, 1930–1995“Social welfare” includes unemployment and old-age insurance,medical insurance, and veterans’ benefits. The skyrocketingcosts from the mid-1960s onward reflect the increasing size(and political clout) of the elderly population, who were themain beneficiaries of Great Society programs like Medicare.The steep rise after 1970 is also explained by the gallopinginflation of the 1970s.

in poverty; three decades later, only about one inten did. The figures for young people moved in thereverse direction: 15 percent of children were livingin poverty in the 1970s, but over 20 percent were inthe 1990s.

These triumphs for senior citizens also broughtfiscal strains, especially on the Social Security sys-tem, established in 1935 to provide income forretired workers. When Social Security began, mostworkers continued to toil after age sixty-five. By cen-tury’s end only a small minority did (about 15 per-cent of men and 8 percent of women), and amajority of the elderly population relied primarilyon Social Security checks for their living expenses.Contrary to popular mythology, Social Security pay-ments to retirees did not simply represent reim-bursement for contributions that the elderly hadmade during their working lives. In fact, the pay-ments of current workers into the Social Securitysystem funded the benefits to the current genera-tion of retirees. By the 1990s, those benefits hadrisen so high, and the ratio of active workers toretirees had dropped so low, that drastic adjust-

ments were necessary. The problem had intensifiedin the 1960s, when Medicare was added to the list ofbenefits for the elderly, and again in the 1970s, whena compassionate Congress dramatically increasedretirement payments at a time when productivitygrowth was stalling. At the beginning of the newcentury, as the huge wave of post–World War II babyboomers approached retirement age, it seemed thatthe “unfunded liability”—the difference betweenwhat the government had promised to pay to theelderly and the taxes it expected to take in—mightrise above $7 trillion, a sum that threatened to bankrupt the Republic unless drastic reforms wereadopted. Yet because of the electoral power of olderAmericans, Social Security and Medicare reformremained the “third rail” of American politics, whichpoliticians touched only at their peril.

Without substantial change, larger payments to retirees could only mean smaller paychecks forworkers. Three-quarters of all employees in the1990s already paid higher Social Security taxes thanincome taxes. (An individual paid a maximum of$5,829 in Social Security taxes in 2000, matched byan identical employer contribution.) A war betweenthe generations loomed in the twenty-first century,as payments to the nonworking elderly threatenedto soak up fully half the working population’s in-come by about 2040.

The New Immigration

Newcomers continued to flow into modern Amer-ica. They washed ashore in waves that numberednearly 1 million persons per year in the 1980s and1990s—the heaviest inflow of immigrants in Amer-ica’s experience. In striking contrast to the historicpattern of immigration, Europe contributed farfewer people than did the teeming countries of Asiaand Latin America, especially Mexico.

What prompted this new migration to America?The truth is that the newest immigrants came formany of the same reasons as the old. They typicallyleft countries where populations were growingrapidly and where agricultural and industrial revo-lutions were shaking people loose from old habits oflife—conditions almost identical to those in nine-teenth-century Europe. And they came to America,as previous immigrants had done, in search of jobsand economic opportunity.

1022 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

The Southwest, from Texas to California, felt theimmigrant impact especially sharply, as Mexicanmigrants—by far the largest contingent of modernimmigrants—concentrated heavily in that region.By the turn of the century, Latinos made up nearlyone-third of the population in Texas, Arizona, and

California, and almost half in New Mexico—a popu-lation shift that amounted to a demographic recon-quista of the lands lost by Mexico in the war of 1846.

The size and geographic concentration of theHispanic population in the Southwest had fewprecedents in the history of American immigration.Most previous groups had been so thinly scatteredacross the land that they had little choice but tolearn English and make their way in the largerAmerican society, however much they might havelonged to preserve their native language and cus-toms. But Mexican-Americans might succeed increating a truly bicultural zone in the boomingsouthwestern states, especially since their motherculture lies just next door and is easily accessible—another factor that differentiates this modern immi-grant community from its nineteenth-centuryEuropean and Asian antecedents.

Some old-stock Americans worried about thecapacity of the modern United States to absorbthese new immigrants. The Immigration Reformand Control Act of 1986 attempted to choke off ille-gal entry by penalizing employers of undocumentedaliens and by granting amnesty to many of thosealready here. Anti-immigrant sentiment flared espe-cially sharply in California in the wake of an eco-nomic recession in the early 1990s. California votersapproved a ballot initiative that attempted to denybenefits, including education, to illegal immigrants,though courts blocked the effort. Congress in 1996restricted access to some welfare benefits for legalimmigrants who arrived after that year.

The Newest Immigrants 1023

Asia Mexico, Cuba,Central America*

5,000

4,500

4,000

3,500

3,000

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500

0Europe

In thousands

*Mexico represents approximately 75 percent of total.

1961–1970

1971–1980

1981–1997

Recent Legal Immigration by Area of Origin, 1961–1997

1024 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

Yet the fact was that foreign-born people accounted for almost 10 percent of the Americanpopulation by the end of the 1990s, a far smaller pro-portion than the historical high point of nearly 15percent recorded in the census of 1910, but evidencenonetheless that American society continued to wel-come—and need—newcomers. Somewhat inconsis-tently, critics charged both that immigrants robbedcitizens of jobs and that they dumped themselves onthe welfare rolls at the taxpayers’ expense. But stud-ies showed that immigrants took jobs scorned byAmericans and that they paid more dollars in taxes(withholding and Social Security taxes, as well assales taxes) than they claimed for welfare payments.A more urgent worry was that unscrupulous employ-ers might take cruel advantage of alien workers, whooften had scant knowledge of their legal rights.

Ethnic Pride

Thanks both to continued immigration and to theirown high birthrate, Hispanic-Americans werebecoming an increasingly important minority (see“Makers of America: The Latinos,” pp. 1026–1027).The United States by the late 1990s was home tomore than 31 million Hispanics. They includedsome 21 million Chicanos, or Mexican-Americans,

mostly in the Southwest, as well as 3 million PuertoRicans, chiefly in the Northeast, and more than 1million Cubans in Florida (where it was jokingly saidthat Miami had become the most “Anglo” city inLatin America).

Flexing their political muscles, Latinos electedmayors of Miami, Denver, and San Antonio. Afteryears of struggle, the United Farm Workers Organiz-ing Committee (UFWOC), headed by the soft-spoken and charismatic César Chávez, succeeded inimproving work conditions for the mostly Chicano“stoop laborers” who followed the cycle of plantingand harvesting across the American West. Hispanicinfluence seemed likely to grow, as suggested by theincreasing presence of Spanish-language ballotsand television broadcasts. Hispanic-Americans,newly confident and organized, were destined tobecome the nation’s largest ethnic minority, out-numbering even African-Americans, in the earlytwenty-first century. Indeed, by the first decade ofthe new century, the Chicano population of Amer-ica’s largest state, California, equaled the Anglo pop-ulation, making the state a patchwork of minoritieswith no single ethnic majority.

Asian-Americans also made great strides. By the1980s they were America’s fastest-growing minority.Their numbers nearly doubled in that decade alone,thanks to heavy immigration, and continued toswell in the 1990s. Once feared and hated as the

“yellow peril” and relegated to the most menial anddegrading jobs, citizens of Asian ancestry were nowcounted among the most prosperous and successfulof Americans—a “model minority.” The typicalAsian-American household enjoyed an incomenearly 20 percent greater than that of the typicalwhite household. In 1996 the voters of Washingtonelected the first Asian-American to serve as gover-nor of a mainland American state.

Indians, the original Americans, shared in thegeneral awakening of ethnic and cultural pride. The2000 census counted some 2.4 million Native Amer-icans, half of whom had left their reservations to livein cities. Meanwhile, unemployment and alco-holism had blighted reservation life. Many tribestried to take advantage of their special legal status asindependent nations by opening bingo halls andgambling casinos for white patrons on reservationlands, but the cycle of discrimination and povertyproved hard to break.

Cities and Suburbs

America’s “alabaster cities” of song and story grewmore sooty and less safe in the closing decades of thetwentieth century. Crime was the great scourge ofurban life. The rate of violent crimes committed incities reached an all-time high in the drug-infested1980s and then leveled off in the early 1990s. Thenumber of violent crimes even began to decline sub-stantially in many areas after 1995. Nevertheless,murders, robberies, and rapes remained shockinglycommon not only in cities but also in suburbs andrural areas. America imprisoned a larger fraction ofits citizens than almost any other country in theworld, and some desperate citizens resorted toarmed vigilante tactics to protect themselves.

Millions of Americans fled the cities altogetherfor the supposedly safer suburbs. So swift and mas-sive was the exodus from the old urban neighbor-hoods that by the mid-1990s it ended the nation’srather brief “urban age,” whose dawn had been her-alded by the census of 1920, the first to show amajority of city dwellers.

A majority of Americans now lived in the sub-urbs, a historic phenomenon that many observersblamed for the spreading fragmentation and isola-tion of American life. Entire suburban neighbor-hoods, usually containing economically and racially

homogeneous populations, walled themselves offbehind elaborate security systems in “gated com-munities.” In these safe but segregated enclaves, thesense of a larger and inclusive national communitymight prove hard to sustain.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century,some major cities exhibited signs of renewal. Com-mercial redevelopment gained ground in cities suchas New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.Well-to-do residents reclaimed once-fashionableneighborhoods and sent real estate values soaring.But these late-century urban homesteaders did little to make cities new centers of residential inte-gration. Cities remained as divided by wealth andrace as the suburban social landscape surroundingthem.

Minority America

Racial and ethnic tensions also exacerbated theproblems of American cities. These stresses wereespecially evident in Los Angeles, which, like NewYork a century earlier, was a magnet for minorities,especially immigrants from Asia and Latin America.When in 1992 a mostly white jury exonerated whiteLos Angeles police officers who had been video-taped ferociously beating a black suspect, theminority neighborhoods of South Central Los Ange-les erupted in rage. Arson and looting laid wasteentire city blocks, and scores of people were killed.In a sobering demonstration of the complexity ofmodern American racial rivalries, many black riot-ers vented their anger at the white police and thejudicial system by attacking Asian shopkeepers,who in turn formed armed patrols to protect theirproperty.

The Los Angeles riots vividly testified to blackskepticism about the American system of justice.Just three years later, again in Los Angeles, thegaudy televised spectacle of former football star O. J.Simpson’s murder trial fed white disillusionmentwith the state of race relations. After months of testi-mony that seemed to point to Simpson’s guilt, thejury acquitted him, presumably because certain LosAngeles police officers involved in the case hadbeen shown to harbor racist sentiments. In a latercivil trial, another jury unanimously found Simpsonliable for the “wrongful deaths” of his former wifeand another victim. The reaction to the Simpson

A Multicultural Society 1025

The Latinos

T oday Mexican food is handed through fast-fooddrive-up windows in all fifty states, Spanish-

language broadcasts fill the airwaves, and the Latinocommunity has its own telephone book, the SpanishYellow Pages. Latinos send representatives to Con-gress and mayors to city hall, record hit songs, paintmurals, and teach history. Latinos, among thefastest-growing segments of the U.S. population,include Puerto Ricans, frequent voyagers betweentheir native island and northeastern cities; Cubans,many of them refugees from the communist dicta-torship of Fidel Castro, concentrated in Miami andsouthern Florida; and Central Americans, fleeing theravages of civil war in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

But the most populous group of Latinos derivesfrom Mexico. The first significant numbers of Mexi-cans began heading for El Norte (“the North”)around 1910, when the upheavals of the Mexican

Revolution stirred and shuffled the Mexican popu-lation into more or less constant flux. Their north-ward passage was briefly interrupted during theGreat Depression, when thousands of Mexicannationals were deported. But immigration resumedduring World War II, and since then a steady flow oflegal immigrants has passed through border check-points, joined by countless millions of their undoc-umented countrymen and countrywomen stealingacross the frontier on moonless nights.

For the most part, these Mexicans came to workin the fields, following the ripening crops northwardto Canada through the summer and autumn months.In winter many headed back to Mexico, but somegathered instead in the cities of the Southwest—ElPaso, Los Angeles, Houston, and San Bernardino.There they found regular work, even if lack of skillsand racial discrimination often confined them to

1026

manual labor. City jobs might pay less than farmlabor, but the work was steady and offered theprospect of a stable home. Houses may have beenshabby in the barrios, but these Mexican neighbor-hoods provided a sense of togetherness, a place toraise a family, and the chance to join a mutual-aidsociety. Such societies, or Mutualistas, sponsoredbaseball leagues, helped the sick and disabled, anddefended their members against discrimination.

Mexican immigrants lived so close to the borderthat their native country acted like a powerful mag-net, drawing them back time and time again. Mexi-cans frequently returned to see relatives or visit thehomes of their youth, and relatively few becameU.S. citizens. Indeed, in many Mexican-Americancommunities, it was a badge of dishonor to applyfor U.S. citizenship.

The Mexican government, likewise influenced bythe proximity of the two countries, intervened in thedaily lives of its nationals in America, further discour-aging them from becoming citizens of their adoptedcountry. As Anglo reformers attempted to Ameri-canize the immigrants in the 1910s and 1920s, the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles launched a Mex-icanization program. The consulate sponsoredparades on Cinco de Mayo (“Fifth of May”), celebrat-ing Mexico’s defeat of a French army at the Battle ofPuebla in 1892, and opened special Spanish-languageschools for children. Since World War II, the Ameri-

can-born generation has carried on the fight for polit-ical representation, economic opportunity, and cul-tural preservation.

Fresh arrivals from Mexico and from the otherLatin American nations daily swell the Latino communities across America. The census of 2000revealed that Latinos are now the largest minoritygroup in the United States, surpassing African-Amer-icans. As the United States heads into the twenty-firstcentury, it is taking on a pronounced Spanish accent,although Latinos’ reticence to vote in elections hasretarded their influence on American politics.

Puerto Rican9.6%

(3.0 million)

Cuban4.3%

(1.4 million)

Other Latino6.6%

(2.1 million)

Central andSouth American

14.3%(4.5 million)

Mexican65.2%

(20.7 million)

Sources of Latino Population in the United States, 1999

verdicts revealed the yawning chasm that separatedwhite and black America, as most whites continuedto believe Simpson guilty, while a majority ofAfrican-Americans told pollsters that the originalnot-guilty verdict was justified. African-Americancharges that they had been unlawfully kept from thepolls during the 2000 presidential election in Floridaconvinced many blacks that they were still facing aJim Crow South of black disenfranchisement.

American cities have always held an astonish-ing variety of ethnic and racial groups, but in thelate twentieth century, minorities made up a major-ity of the population of many American cities, aswhites fled to the suburbs. More than three-quartersof African-Americans lived in cities by the 1990s,whereas only about one-quarter of whites did. Themost desperate black ghettos, housing a hapless“underclass” in the inner core of the old industrialcities, were especially problematic. Successfulblacks who had benefited from the civil rights revo-lution of the 1950s and 1960s followed whites to thesuburbs, leaving a residue of the poorest poor in theold ghettos. Without a middle class to sustain com-munity institutions like schools and small busi-nesses, the inner cities, plagued by unemploymentand drug addiction, seemed bereft of leadership,cohesion, resources, and hope.

The friendless underclass, heavily composed ofblacks and other minorities, represented a sorry—and dangerous—social failure that eluded anyknown remedy. But other segments of the African-American community had clearly prospered in the

wake of the civil rights gains of the 1950s and 1960s,though they still had a long hill to climb beforereaching full equality. By the 1990s about 40 percentof blacks were counted in the middle class (definedas enjoying family income greater than $25,000 peryear). The number of black elected officials hadrisen above the seven thousand mark, includingmore than a thousand in the Old South, some twodozen members of Congress, and the mayors of sev-eral large cities. Voting tallies demonstrated thatsuccessful black politicians were moving beyond

1028 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

In 1990 the African-American intellectualShelby Steele (b. 1946) declared in hisprovocative book, The Content of OurCharacter,

“What is needed now is a new spirit ofpragmatism in racial matters where blacksare seen simply as American citizens whodeserve complete fairness and in some casesdevelopmental assistance, but in no casespecial entitlements based on color. We needderacinated social policies that attack povertyrather than black poverty and that instillthose values that make for self-reliance.”

A Country Politically Divided Between City andCountry Computer mapping of election data hashelped analysts identify patterns in Americans’political behavior. This county-level map of elec-tion-night returns from the November 2000 presi-dential election reveals a deadlock between urbanDemocrats and rural Republicans. Even thoughDemocratic nominee Albert Gore won the popularvote, he prevailed in only 676 counties, fewer thanhalf of what Bill Clinton had won four years earlier.Yet Gore took virtually all major cities and most oftheir surrounding suburbs, giving him the lead inthe heavily populated coasts and most metropoli-tan areas in the interior. Bush, on the other hand,carried an impressive 2,477 counties, and virtuallyevery small town on a straight line from Redding,California, to Springfield, Illinois. In the vast west-ern plain of Republican red, cities like St. Louis,

Kansas City, Tulsa, and Las Vegas were rare out-posts of Democratic blue. Gore’s huge win in Port-land was big enough to give him the state in theElectoral College, even though the rest of Oregonvoted heavily for Bush. The division of this mapinto red and blue territory vividly portrays a deepcultural chasm between urban and rural America.While minorities, union members, and prosperingwhite collar workers remained loyal to the party ofClinton, small-town white America experiencedthe Clinton years as an assault on their most cher-ished values concerning issues like abortion, gen-der roles, and gun ownership. What additionalvoting patterns does this election map reveal? How did other economic, social, and culturalissues separate Americans into these two camps? How else might computers be used for historical analysis?

HAWAII

R.I.

DEL.

D.C.

WASH.

ORE.

CALIF.

NEV.

IDAHO

MONTANA

WYO.

UTAHCOLO.

ARIZ.

S.D.

KANSAS

OKLA.

MICH.

N.Y.

N.D.

MINN.

IOWANEBR.

MO.

ARK.

LA.TEXAS

N.M.

MISS.

ALA.GA.

FLA.

TENN.N.C.

S.C.

VA.W. VA.

PA.

OHIOIND.

ILL.

WISC.

KY.

ME.

N.H.

VT.

MASS.

CONN.

N.J. 15MD.

ALASKA

Gore—DemocraticBush—RepublicanTieResults not available

*Alaska does not have county boundaries.The boundaries shown are election areas.

(Source: Adapted from VNS Graphic by Stanford Kay-Newsweek)

Examining the Evidence 1029

isolated racial constituencies and into the politicalmainstream by appealing to a wide variety of voters.In 1989 Virginians, only 15 percent of whom wereblack, chose L. Douglas Wilder as the first African-American elected to serve as a state governor. In1994 voters in Illinois made Carol Moseley-Braunthe first African-American woman elected to theU.S. Senate.

Single women headed over half of black families,almost three times the rate for whites. Many of thoseAfrican-American women, husbandless and jobless,necessarily depended on welfare to feed their chil-dren. As social scientists increasingly emphasizedthe importance of the home environment for suc-cess in school, it became clear that many fatherless,impoverished African-American children seemedconsigned to suffer from educational handicaps thatwere difficult to overcome. Black youths in the 1990sstill had about one year less schooling than whites ofthe same age and were less than half as likely to earncollege degrees. As the American economy becameever more driven by new applications of computersand biotechnology, these disadvantages were boundto widen the racial gap of employment opportunity.The political assault against affirmative action inCalifornia and elsewhere only compounded theobstacles to advanced training for many youngAfrican-Americans.

The Life of the Mind

Despite the mind-sapping chatter of the “boobtube,” Americans in the late twentieth century readmore, listened to more music, and were better edu-cated than ever before. By the 1990s colleges wereawarding nearly a million degrees a year, and oneperson in four in the twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-old age group was a college graduate. Thisexpanding mass of educated people lifted the econ-omy to more advanced levels while creating con-sumers of “high culture.” Americans annually madesome 300 million visits to museums in the 1990sand patronized about a thousand opera companiesand fifteen hundred symphony orchestras—as wellas countless popular music groups, including theinventive performers known as Phish and the long-lived sixties survivors the Grateful Dead.

What Americans read said much about the stateof American society at the dawn of the new century.Among the most striking development in Americanletters was the rise of authors from the once-marginal regions and ethnic groups now cominginto their own. Reflecting the general populationshift westward, the West became the subject of a particularly rich literary outpouring. LarryMcMurtry wrote about the small-town West and

1030 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

lovingly recollected the end of the cattle-drive era inLonesome Dove (1985). Raymond Carver pennedunderstated and powerful stories about working-class life in the Pacific Northwest. Annie Dillard,Ivan Doig, and Jim Harrison re-created the grittyfrontier history of that same verdant region. DavidGuterson penned a moving tale of interracial anxi-ety and affection in the World War II–era PacificNorthwest in Snow Falling on Cedars (1994). WallaceStegner, the acknowledged dean of western writers,produced several works that far transcended theirregional themes, including Angle of Repose (1971)and Crossing to Safety (1987). Norman MacLean, aformer English professor who turned to fiction writ-ing in his retirement, left two unforgettableaccounts of his boyhood in Montana: A River RunsThrough It (1976) and Young Men and Fire (1992).

African-American authors and artists alsoincreasingly made their mark. Playwright AugustWilson retold the history of black Americans in thetwentieth century, with special emphasis on thepsychic costs of the northward migration (Fences,1985; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 1988; Jitney,1998). In the usually lighthearted medium of the Broadway musical, George Wolfe sensitivelyexplored sobering questions of black identity inJelly’s Last Jam (1992), the life story of the great NewOrleans jazzman “Jelly Roll” Morton. Alice Walkergave fictional voice to the experiences of blackwomen in her hugely popular The Color Purple(1982). Toni Morrison wove a bewitching portrait ofmaternal affection in Beloved (1987) and in 1993became the first African-American woman to winthe Nobel Prize for literature. Native-Americans,too, achieved literary recognition. Kiowa author N.Scott Momaday won a Pulitzer Prize for his por-trayal of Indian life in House Made of Dawn (1968).James Welch wrote movingly about his Blackfootancestors in Fools Crow (1986).

Asian-American authors also flourished, amongthem playwright David Hwang and essayist MaxineHong Kingston, whose The Woman Warrior (1976)and China Men (1980) imaginatively reconstructedthe obscure lives of the earliest Chinese immigrants.Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999)explored the sometimes painful relationship betweenimmigrant Indian parents and their American-bornchildren. The older European migration continued tohold literary appeal as well, notably with FrankMcCourt’s memories of an Irish and American child-hood, captured in Angela’s Ashes (1996).

Women writers and women’s themes forged tothe fictional forefront as the feminist movementadvanced. Jane Smiley modeled her touching narra-tive of a midwestern farm family, A Thousand Acres(1991), on Shakespeare’s King Lear and followed upwith a hilarious spoof of university life in Moo(1995). Ann Tyler penned memorable portraits ofquirky characters, male as well as female, in Dinnerat the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and The Acciden-tal Tourist (1985). E. Annie Proulx won widespreadacclaim with her comical yet tender portrayal of astruggling family in The Shipping News (1993). Therising interest in feminist and African-Americanthemes revived the popularity of a 1930s writer,Zora Neale Hurston, especially her naturalisticnovel Their Eyes Were Watching God, first publishedin 1937.

New York became the art capital of the worldafter World War II, as well-heeled Americans sup-ported a large number of painters and sculptors.The Ford Foundation also became a major patron ofthe arts, as did the federal government after the cre-ation of the tax-supported National Endowment forthe Arts in 1965. The open and tradition-free Ameri-can environment seemed especially congenial tothe experimental mood of much modern art. Jack-son Pollock pioneered abstract expressionism in

New Currents in American Literature 1031

In her touching novel The Joy Luck Club,Amy Tan explored the complex dilemmas ofgrowing up as a Chinese-American:

“‘A girl is like a young tree,’ [my mother] said. ‘You must stand tall and listen to yourmother standing next to you. That is the onlyway to grow strong and straight. But if youbend to listen to other people, you will growcrooked and weak. . . .’ Over the years Ilearned to choose from the best opinions.Chinese people had Chinese opinions. Ameri-can people had American opinions. And inalmost every case, the American version wasmuch better.

“It was only later that I discovered therewas a serious flaw with the American version.There were too many choices, so it was easyto get confused and pick the wrong thing.”

the 1940s and 1950s, flinging paint on huge flatsstretched on his studio floor. Realistic representa-tion went out the window, as artists like Pollock andWillem de Kooning strove to create “action paint-ings” that expressed the painter’s individuality andmade the viewer a creative participant in definingthe painting’s meaning. Pop artists in the 1960s,notably Andy Warhol, canonized on canvas every-day items of consumer culture, such as soup cans.Robert Rauschenberg made elaborate collages outof objects like cardboard boxes and newspaper clip-pings. Claes Oldenburg tried to stun viewers into anew visual awareness with unfamiliar versions offamiliar objects, such as giant plastic sculptures ofpillow-soft telephones. The venerable Georgia O’Keeffe, whose first exhibit was in 1916, continuedwell into the post–World War II period to producestunningly immaculate, vividly colored paintings ofher beloved Southwest, and moved increasingly intoabstract works as her career progressed.

On the stage, playwright David Mamet analyzedthe barbarity of American capitalism in plays likeGlengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, in whichhe crafted a kind of poetry from the sludge of Ameri-can slang. Mamet also made savage sport of femi-nism and “political correctness” in Oleanna, a bitingsatire about a woman student and her professor.The AIDS epidemic inspired Tony Kushner’s sensa-tionally inventive Angels in America, a broad-ranging commentary, alternately hilarious andtouching, about the condition of American life atcentury’s end. Film, the most characteristic Ameri-can art form, continued to flourish, especially as awave of younger filmmakers like George Lucas,Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, and the Coen brothers,as well as the innovative documentary artist KenBurns, made their influence felt.

Architecture also benefited from the buildingboom of the postwar era. Old master Frank LloydWright produced strikingly original designs, as in

1032 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

the round-walled Guggenheim Museum in NewYork. Louis Kahn employed stark geometric formsand basic building materials like brick and concreteto make beautiful, simple buildings. Eero Saarinen,the son of a Finnish immigrant, contributed a num-ber of imaginative structures, including two YaleUniversity residential colleges that evoked theatmosphere of an Italian hill town. Chinese-bornI. M. Pei designed numerous graceful buildings onseveral college campuses, as well as the John F.Kennedy Library in Boston. Philip Johnson artfullyrendered huge edifices intimate in structures likeNew York City's Seagram Building and the New YorkState Theater at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.“Postmodernists” such as Robert Venturi andMichael Graves, inspired by the decorative details ofearlier historical styles, rejected the spare function-alism that had dominated modern architecture formuch of the century.

The American Prospect in the Age of Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, America’s good luck appar-ently ran out. Out of a crystal-clear sky, suicidal ter-rorists slammed two hijacked airliners, loaded withpassengers and jet fuel, into the twin towers of NewYork City’s World Trade Center. They flew a thirdplane into the military nerve-center of the Penta-gon, near Washington, D.C., killing 189 people.Heroic passengers forced another hijacked aircraftto crash in rural Pennsylvania, killing all 44 aboardbut depriving the terrorists of a fourth weapon ofmass destruction. As the two giant New York sky-scrapers thunderously collapsed, some three thou-sand innocent victims perished, including peoplesof many races and faiths from more than sixty coun-tries, as well as hundreds of New York’s police- andfire-department rescue workers, A stunned nationblossomed with flags, as grieving and outragedAmericans struggled to express their sorrow andsolidarity in the face of catastrophic terrorism.

The murderous events of that late-summermorning reanimated American patriotism. They alsodramatically ended an historical era. For nearly twocenturies, the United States had been spared fromforeign attack against its homeland. All but uniqueamong modern peoples, that degree of nationalsecurity had undergirded the values of openness and

individual freedom that defined the distinctive char-acter of American society. Now American securityand American liberty alike were imperiled.

President Bush responded with a sober but stir-ring address to Congress nine days later. His solemndemeanor and the gravity of the situation helped todissipate the cloud of illegitimacy that had shad-owed his presidency since the disputed election of2000. Warning that the struggle against terrorismwould be long and messy, he pledged “we will nottire, we will not falter, and we will not fail” until “webring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to ourenemies.” While emphasizing his respect for theIslamic religion and Muslim peoples, he identifiedthe principal enemy as Osama bin Laden, head of ashadowy terrorist network known as Al Qaeda (“thebase” in Arabic). A wealthy extremist exiled from hisnative Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was associated withearlier attacks on American embassies in East Africaand on a U.S. Naval vessel in Yemen. He had takenrefuge in land-locked Afghanistan, ruled by Islamicfundamentalists called the Taliban. (Ironically, theUnited States had indirectly helped bring the Talibanto power, when it supported religious rebels resistingthe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s). BinLaden was known to harbor bitter resentmentstoward the United States for its economic embargoagainst Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, its military presenceon the sacred soil of the Arabian peninsula, and itssupport for Israel’s hostility to Palestinian national-ism. Bin Laden also fed on world-wide resentment ofAmerica’s enormous economic, military, and cul-tural power. Ironically, America’s most conspicuousstrengths had made it a conspicuous target.

When the Taliban refused to hand over binLaden, Bush ordered a massive military campaignagainst Afghanistan. Within three months, Ameri-can and Afghani rebel forces had overthrown theTaliban and were poised to flush bin Laden out ofthe fortified underground sanctuary where he wasbelieved to have holed up.

The campaign in Afghanistan impressivelydemonstrated the wallop and sophistication of Amer-ican air power and “smart,” precision-guided muni-tions. But it remained an open question whether inthe longer run America’s high-tech arsenal wouldprove effective against foes so elusive, zealous, anddetermined—foes who sought not simply to destroythe United States but to demoralize it, perhaps to cor-rupt its very soul. Behind bin Laden lurked countlessterrorist “cells” in several dozen countries, some of

America’s Challenge 1033

them possibly in possession of biochemical or evennuclear weapons. Some alarmed critics even warnedthat the events of September 11 heralded the onset ofa protracted clash of civilizations, pitting millions ofMuslims desperate to defend their traditional faithand culture against the relentlessly modernizingforces of the western world, spearheaded by theUnited States. Confronted with this unconventional,diffuse menace, anti-terrorism experts called for newtactics of “a-symmetrical warfare,” employing not justtraditional military muscle, but innovative intelli-gence-gathering, economic reprisals, infiltration ofsuspected organizations, and even assassinations.The new war against terror also compelled the Bushadministration to back away from the unilateralistforeign policies it had pursued in its early months andseek anti-terrorist partners around the globe, as evi-denced by the surprisingly warm relationship that

emerged after September 11 between the UnitedStates and its former adversary, Russia.

The terrorists’ blows diabolically coincided withthe onset of a recession. The already gathering eco-nomic downdraft worsened as edgy Americansshunned air travel and the tourist industry with-ered. Then, while the rubble in New York was stillsmoldering, a handful of Americans died afterreceiving letters contaminated with the deadly res-piratory disease, anthrax. The gnawing fear spreadthat biological warfare would be the next threat fac-ing the American people.

In this anxious atmosphere, Congress rammedthrough the USA-Patriot Act, permitting extensivetelephone and e-mail surveillance, and authorizingthe detention and deportation of immigrants sus-pected of terrorism. The Justice Department mean-while rounded up hundreds of immigrants and heldthem without habeas corpus (formal charges in anopen court). The Bush administration further calledfor trying suspected terrorists before military tri-bunals, where the usual rules of evidence and pro-cedure did not apply. Public opinion polls showedAmericans sharply divided on whether the terroristthreat fully warranted such drastic encroachmentson America’s ancient traditions of civil liberties.

Catastrophic terrorism posed an unprecedentedchallenge to the United States, but the world’s oldestrepublic remained resilient and resourceful. Born asa revolutionary force in a world of conservatism, theUnited States had emerged in the twentieth centuryas a conservative force in a world of revolution. Itheld aloft the banner of liberal democracy in a worldwracked by revolutions of the right and left, includ-ing fascism, Nazism, and communism. Yet through itall, much that was truly revolutionary also remaineda part of America’s liberal democratic heritage, as itspeople pioneered in revolutions against colonialism,racism, sexism, ignorance, and poverty.

The terrorist threat reminded Americans of theurgency of resolving the ethnic and cultural conflictsthat continued to plague the planet after the ColdWar’s end—and of the urgency of making America’sown character better understood around the world.Americans still aspired to live up to Lincoln’s predic-tion that they and their heritage represented “the lastbest hope of earth”—but in the twenty-first centurythey would have to work harder than ever to prove it,to themselves as well as to others.

1034 CHAPTER 42 The American People Face a New Century

For further reading, see page A29 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.