America’s Booming World

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31380, 27 May 1967, Page 4

America’s Booming World

The Great Leap. By John Brooks. Gollancz. 382 pp. “America, the New World,” is committed to the idea of change. For many of her citizens, America is change; it is the living symbol of a bright new world of hope. Conceived by the promise of change, bursting the frontiers of old world habits, America has continually prospered. So runs the argument, and the slightest acquaintance with America bears it out. The last 25 years, which Mr Brooks analyses in this lively and entertaining book, have alone amounted to a revolution.

Figures give some idea of the development: practically everything seems to be a postwar invention, or, if it was around before, to have at least doubled its numbers. To take some random examples: there are now 90,000 millionaires in the United States, and the number is Increasing by about 5000 a year; the number earning enough to qualify for income tax is 4600 per cent more than in 1939. To change the subject to one reflecting sheer size, there were, in 1965, 50 songs that began with the words “Blue Jeans.” The only things, in fact, which have not shared the boom are hotels (taken over by furiously mushrooming motels), picture theatres (defeated by many new entertainments, chiefly television, and farms (combined into larger units). A characteristic of the new age is the levelling of society into one big middle elass. There are fewer extremes of wealth, and the average is higher. Many facets of the Great Commercial Society result from this, notably Madison Avenue advertising, and the übiquitous public relations men. The great corporation is the hallmark of the age. The old-fashioned capitalist, tough and thrifty, has disappeared; now the big companies, although earning vastly increased sums, dispense liberally. Philanthropy and welfare schemes are universal, acting no doubt as an important substitute for the

lack of federal social security. Mr Brooks remarks that the leading corporations have budgets as big as many countries. In happy harmony with the advertising men they work busily at creating “image”— the “in-word” of a generation. But the Great Leap has not all been smooth and orderly. The inevitable result of individual laissez-faire has been laek of planning. (The word itself is often thought “Communist,” although corporations plan their activities as much as any sodalist organisation.) It has been thought improper for anything to halt the progress of profit The open spaces have been despoiled, all the great eastern rivers polluted. Six-lane highways carve the continent; endless billboards blot out views. Historic landmarks are pulled down, and old buildings demolished. In their place is glass—enough for 40,000

people to try to walk through closed doors and windows each year. Observing this process, one commentator is quoted as saying that “the impression gained is one of pathologically profit-minded enterprises striving to outdo each other In the creation of eye-sores.” The middle classes have become restless. Vast numbers travel widely, join societies, and work hard at the exacting demands of fashion gimmickry and lab-our-saving devices. The everpresent and would-be forgotten poor turn increasingly to alcohol and drugs, while student fads go further and further out (The big craze of a few years back was, we are told, eating live goldfish.) America’s world is booming, boisterous and very rich, but Mr Brooks suggests there has been an "ideological lag” that ideas have not kept pace with realities. America Indeed was founded by ideas—those of eighteenth-century liberalism—and there has been a tendency ever since to justify all by appealing back to those Ideas, by invoking the excellent but sometimes in applicable, wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Political non-con-formists have been shrugged off by misleading references to “patriotism.’’ Conservationists have been told: “You can't stand in the way of progress.”

Only in the very recent past has it been admitted that change is not necessarily for the better. Growth, the Great Leap, has not always been progress. And America will have no guarantee of universal happiness, in the sense

of well-being, until her political and social ideas catch up with her booming technology. What is so good about this book is Mr Brooks himself. He writes as though he enjoys it, and carries the reader along in the vigorous wave of enthusiasm. Facts and figures abound, not perfunctorily, but interestingly. Mr Brooks is always serious, in that he is relevant, but he is never sombre. There is no mere cold sociological jargon here; neither is there, as would have been fatally easy, mere eccentricity. Mr Brooks has nicely combined fact and anecdote.