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�DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20410
THE SECRETARY
August 12, 1995
MEMORANDUM FOR:
FROM:
Henr¥
SUBJECT:
President Bill Clinton
~~~~~~~~~~~~-.
Thoughts on the Intensity of Anger in
American Public Life
After the Oklahoma City bombing, I spent time
trying to understand the intensity of anger in the
political environment.
In conversations with my
friend Roger Kennedy, Director of the National
Park Service and former Director of the
Smithsonian Museum of American History, we
concluded that it is not possible to understand
the anger without a historical context, which
includes Americans' long-standing ambivalence
about the central government.
The attached paper sets forth our thoughts .
for your use and concludes with elements of an
American Covenant which I hope can be helpful to
you.
Attachment
�From Fear and Anger to An American Covenant of Hope
. Henry G. Cisneros
Roger Kennedy
It us in the American political· -character to ,. take
charge of events, frequently through mass action.
The current public impatience is not an aberration.
The nation's experience is that in times of political ·
volatility, anger is pointed at the central government
and that in such times the resolution - political
accommodation o·r violent expiation - has depended
upon leaders' responses.
This paper has three parts. · The first is historical,
the
second descriptive
of the
present
public
volatility, and the third proposes some steps for the
future.
�1
PART ONE:
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS ACTED TO MAKE GOVERNMENT
CHANGE
The working hypothesis of this paper is that when the tectonic plates of
the economic and cultural alignments in their lives commence massive shifts,
the American people have historically taken matters into their own hands ..
Sometimes they accelerate these changes, sometimes they seek to counteract
them. But they are not passive; mass citizen action is an American tradition.
It is in our character as a people not to wait for political institutions, ""the
· government"', to ••get it.•• We have in such times taken charge of events
through expressions of moral outrage followed by citizen organizing and
action. Today's assertions of popular determination include, within the
traditional frame of politics, the politicization of evangelical Christianity and
conservative Catholicism in ""the Religious Right"" and the successes of the
activist Republican Congressional majority. At the farthest extremes are the
militia movement and acts of violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing.
Political violence is not new in our country as Americans take charge
of their circumstances, but neither has it been the inevitable accompaniment
of change. In the 1770s and 1860s accumulated imperatives met intractable
opposition and expiation came through bloodshed. In the' 'Age of Jackson a:nd
�2
of Refonn, during the 1830s and 1840s, refonn occurred relatively peacefully.
In the time of Thomas Jefferson, the years of the Populist-Progressive Revolt,
and of the New Deal, relatively peaceful outcomes emerged from a
combination of skillful leadership and fortuitous external events, though after
sporadic and localized violence.
The recurrent surges of citizen action have had violent outcomes when
there was an insufficient wisdom or vigor in the responses of political leaders.
During other crises the requisite leadership has been present to manage a
political rather than· a violent resolution.
In doing so, that leadership has had to cope with another American
constancy or, rather, inconstancy: ambivalence about central authority.
Sometimes Americans have sought the aid of such authority. Sometimes they
have strained against it. This ambivalence, especially as to the role of the
federal government, is a major theme in our history; the expiation or
resolution of citizen unrest has largely depended upon how leaders worked
with it, despite it, or directed it.
Our thoughts have been arranged into descriptions of a series of
historic periods in which massive changes occurred, accompanied by public
insistence. We describe the ways in which the people rose up and the
�3
outcomes of their uprising, either in resolution or in bloodshed. In each
instance we have also tried to show how political leadership affected those
outcomes and how leaders resolved tensions between central authority and
citizen action.
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
(I) 1774-1783 -Independence
The British civil wars of the seventeenth century produced the
decapitation of one king and the exiling of another. Regicide is like patricide;
· patterns of deference, once ruptured, cannot be stitched back together.
Central authority was no longer impressive; increasingly, in the colonies, that
authority was no longer felt to be necessary. Early in the 18th century,
Americans took upon themselves authority abandoned by absentee landed
proprietors (Calverts, Penns, Culpepers, Ashleys and Coopers) whose title
had come from the Crown~ In mid-cen~ry, colonists had been protected in
passage to America by the royal Navy and, once ashore, by the Royal Armies.
But after the French and Indian wars abated in 1763, the '"evil empire"" of
France having been removed from North America, a decapitated royal system
and a discredited proprietary system offered little and asked, they felt, too
much.
�4
At that moment the British central government chose to reinstate oldfashioned mercantilist controls, and also set the British anny athwart a
""proclamation line~· to deny western expansion. Americans had tasted liberty,
had enjoyed the riches of the trans-Appalachian West, and were growing
rapidly in numbers, wealth and confidence. · They resisted taxes upon
commerce (Stamp Acts) or luxuries (tea) and parliamentary efforts to deny
them the right to manufacture or to engage in international trade.
""Rights of man"" rhetoric developed during the British Civil Wars was
coupled to Puritan aversion to the moral squalor of the Royal Court and the
sinful city of London. The deist eloquence of Thomas Paine and Thomas
Jefferson was proclaimed in counterpoint with the religious redemptionism of
Yankees seeking to establish in America a City on the Hill.
In a pattern that repeated itself many times in American history, the
people took charge of events. There ensued a tax revolt, the Boston Tea
Party. The M.inute Men at Concord and Lexington fought British troops they
no longer needed or respected. Rising to sustain some ""ordered liberty,"" the
authors of the Declaration of Independence stated the cases for both a system
of natural rights and for freedom from imperial mercantilism.
�5
In this case, a negotiated outcome was not achieved; the geog.raphic,
social and psychological distances were too great,· and there was an abject
failure of leadership in London. The emergent power of the Americans did not
abide suppression by the distant ineptitude of the central power. After a nineyear war, the British admitted defeat and conceded the independence of
thirteen out of their fifteen North American ·colonies.
(II) 1783 - 1800 Experiments in Central and Dispersed Authority:
-
The First Confederacy, the Constitution, and '"the Revolution of 1800'"
The Founders did not have an easy time of it. Their firSt effort to fonn
an effective government, the First Confederacy (of the Articles of
Confederation) was a failure, lacking central authority over taxation, military
support, and interstate commerce. State endeavors to liquidate war debts led·
citizens to take matters into their own hands in Shays's and other popular
rebellions.
The second founding, under the Constitution, produced sharp divisions,
with George· Mason, Patrick Henry and James Monroe among those opposing
the Constitution itself. After a protracted but non-violent debate, the
Federalists triumphed, but taxation by the national government to pay state
war debts produced another round of violence against central authority in the
Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky, Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Only
�6
George Washington's personal authority, reinstated by his personal command
of annies against the rebels, and Indian victories in the Northwest inducing
a
renewed reliance upon Federal troops quieted anti-Federal feeling. None the
less, there were threats of secession in Kentucky and Tennessee from 1783
onward andl in New England after 1800. Slave revolts threatened New Orleans,
Richmond and Charleston, as Blacks rose up to assert aspirations set loose
by the Revolution and respond to promises of emancipation on the part of
both the British and Americans.
Debt reduction, a national banking and industrial policy, and military
\
\.
necessity encouraged Hamiltonians toward centralizing on the British model.
The Jeffersonians created an anti-central coalition of debtors, Northern
artisans, Western subsistence farmers~ and land-hungry, expansionist
planters.
Thomas Jefferson won in 1800, in what he called a ""revolution... But its
most conspicuous achievement was that it was not. It was a bloodless and
skillful resolution. The forces in tension were determining the future of the
American experiment: there were fierce differences of interest between North
and South, slave and free, seaboard and· mountain frontier, city, farm and
plantation. T~e rhetoric was violent as ""Royalist Anglomaniacs"" attacked
""Jacobins"". However, a judicious scrutiny of possibilities for coalition kept
�7
the Federalists from secession while Jefferson proclaimed '"we are all
Federalists, all Republicans." In economic and racial policy, they became so.
(Ill) 1828 - 1850 The Jacksonian Resolution
The presidency of Andrew Jackson commenced with Westerner's
attacks upon Eastern "privilege" imbedded in the symbiosis of the Second
National Bank and the central government Jackson's Westerners had
accumulated power quickly through a multitude of personal decisions to
escape the old order of the East Tennessee's white population multiplied by
eight times in the two decades in which Jackson established himself there,
while Ohio's grew by six times in just one of those decades (1800-1810).
Once the Bank was broken, Jackson became a centralizer.
Tennesseans had threatened secession until they got the presidency. Then,
when South Carolinians raised the stakes by threatening "nullification",
interposing state sovereignty before federal enacbnents, Jackson threatened
to use federal troops against them. The fight was ostensibly over tariffs but,
as the Carolina leaders made clear, it was actually an effort by Southerners to
forestall another increasing popular movement: opposition to slavery.
Jackson threatened to send in Federal troops to enforce commercial policy.
The Southern slave owners did not secede in the 1830s; instead they skillfully
used their power in Washington to dominate national policy while developing
a states-rights doctrine for the moment when that power might wane.
�8
Correctly assessing the power of the 3/5ths clause and Northern respect for
cheap cotton, their hold on national policy was not broken until 1860.
·.During this period, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century,
federal power was not the most significant factor in social reform; it was
neither arrayed against slavery nor for other positive change. Citizens, Black
and White, achieved what they could privately and in groups. They broke a
national addiction: a Second Great (religious) Awakening and a great refonn
-
awakening cut per capita alcohol consumption by 2/3rds, roughly to its 1995
level, without temperance legislation. It was done by individual decision and
group pressure. As economic growth resumed in the 1840s, the public began
. to tum toward government to assure women's legal rights, prison refonn, and
wider public education (as late as 1850, more than half the cost of public
education was contributed privately).
The reformers might have forced federal action toward these ends had
they not simultaneously sought that aid toward another objective, one so
fiercely resisted for the next two decades that central authority was
neutralized. That objective was at first the penning in of slavery and then its
abolition.
(IV) 1860-65 -The Great Expiation
The Civil War began as a War to Save the Union. After 1862, it became
�9
the war to save the Union from its worst self and for its better self.
Though the nation was experiencing unprecedented prosperity, with per
.
capital output and wealth at record levels in the decade 1850 to 1860, its
moral, racial and economic stresses were becoming irreconcilable. The
owners of the slave plantation system had engrossed, first,· the southern half
of the,tran$-Appalachian West to the Mississippi, then Florida, then the
southern half of the Louisiana purchase, and finally all the lands acquired
from Mexico which could readily grow cotton or sugar. The dispute over
slavery flared each time the nation organized new territory in the West: in
1784 (the trans-Appalachian West), 1787 (the Northwest Territory), 1798 _
(Mississippi Territory), 1802 and 1806 (the two portions of the Louisiana
Purchase), 1819 (The Missouri Compromise), 1850 (the Compromise of 1850),
and 1854 (the Kansas-Nebraska Act).
As the South's white population declined relative to that of the North
and world opinion turned away from slavery, the South remained
economically colonial, dependent upon foreign credit and foreign pricing of its
'\
staple crops. It missed its chances for the industrial diversification and
urbanization which made the Northern economy resilient and relatively
independent of world markets. The Northern labor force acquired a multitude
of skills as slavery denied those skills to most of the Black labor force of the
�10
South. The Northern labor force, though hardly affluent, could let its
resenbnents escape to the West; it was free to move, while the African
American laborers of the South were trapped in an obsolete system managed
through violence. Some Southerners such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner,
and some Northerners such as John Brown, took matters into their own
hands, using violence against violence. Other Southerners such as the
"'Nachez Nabobs"' remained strongly Unionist; after all, all three branches of
the federal government were on the side of the slave owners. In the Dred
Scott case, Chief Justice Taney ,of the United States Supreme Court declared
that no Black, slave or free, could ever be a citizen. The Fugitive Slave Law of
1850 ·reiterated the principle that the federal government could dip deep into
family life and local communities and send slaves. back to conditions depicted
in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Writers such as William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau joined
Harriet Beecher Stowe in stoking popular feeling; citizens not only resisted
federal agents returning slaves to masters, but conducted the Underground
Railroad in defi.ance of federal law. Then extremists of the South took upon
themselves the onus of resistance to the Federal government, seceding from
the Union, and firing upon Federal troops, rather than submitting to the free
elections of 1860. Conservatives in the North were swept along .toward radical
abolition after Ft. Sumter.
�11
Abraham Lincoln had come to power with a careful compromise. The
Union was to be held together with slavery left in place though denied further
expansion. There was to be a delicate balance of state rights as to slavery
within state boundaries and a federal prohibition against its further spread.
But by 1863, the war had burned away all equivocation. Partly in response to
a shift in domestic opinion, partly to gain European approval, slavery was
partially abolished by President Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation.
With the slave power prostrated by war, slavery's legal structure was largely
-
eradicated by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The sword of expiation was the "'terrible swift sword'' of the bloodiest
war in American history, followed by Reconstruction, which implemented the
Amendments, pitting federal authorities against local opposition.
M 1860 -1890- Manifest Destiny and Manifest Government
The movement of individuals westward across the continent from
1820 to 1920 was the greatest American mass migration since the movement
of Africans and Europeans to the continent. In the American imagination the
great age of westering came after the Civil War as the Cattle Kingdom briefly
flowered and the Indian Wars flamed across the western horizon. But
westering did not end in 11900. It has continued: in our grandparents day, only
a million people lived west of the Mississippi. During Theodore Roosevelt's
�J
.
12
administration, there were fewer people west of the Mississippi than there are
today in the Los Angeles basin. The last great surge of ""homesteading'" was
between 1904 and 1920, when 100 million acres of government land went
private.
The arts provided the mythology: from Fenimore Cooper to Owen Wistar
and Louis L'Amour, from Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett to Wild Bill Hickok
and Buffalo Bill Cody, painters of the ""Hudson Valley School'" painted the
Yellowstone and Colorado, and were followed by engravers, photographers
and cinematographers. The federal government provided the cavalry.
The '"feds'" had a mighty role in the western migration from the
beginning. The cavalry was constantly available, and so were the land grants.
.
.
West of the Mississippi taxes paid by eastern citizens were used by the
federal government to subsidize western railroads; federal tax revenues were
pledged to pay railroad debts. And federal troops defended both seWers and
railroads.
Pioneers went West with sufficient self reliance thereafter to forget
some of .that federal aid. Though assisted throughout, this migration across
the land was not centrally organized and sponsored, as westward colonization
�13
across the sea had been. It came through millions of individual decisions to
give something up and to accept higher risk and generally a lower standard of
living, for a time, in order to have a chance for something better, later. So,
once in possession of what had been federal land, it was natural for pioneers
to feel that that land had been theirs all along, and that they had done it all by
themselves.
From time to time, when ''hostiles•• appeared, the sight of a uniform on
-
the horizon was welcome. But once the enemy was gone, so was a felt need
for centrally deployed assistance. The psychology of westering has a long
and consistent association with ""citizen action" and with grudging
acknowledgement of central contributions, from the time it was expressed in
uniforms to the arrival of electrification, irrigation and power. "Citizen action"
meant pouring westward out of the crowded, exhausted East; it also meant
aversion to hierarchy, and that aspiration to own one's own land that is an
American constant. After President George Washington made a brief effort in
1794 to hold back the flood, no subsequent American leader tried again. Even
after the Pacific was reached, an overseas empire beckoned still farther, to
Hawaii, Alaska, and the Philippines.
(VI) 1865-1914- Monopoly Capitalism, and the Second Age of Reform
During most of the nineteenth century, the federal government
�14
encouraged corporate growth by tax policy, monetary policy, tariff policy, and
constitutional interpretation. Through the resumption of specie payments and
a sequence of deflationary pdlicies forcing down commodity prices, especially
the crops of the West, it interfered in the market by subsidizing lending
institutions at the expense of borrowerS (especially fanners borrowing
through mortgages). As late as 1915, despite some reflation in the 1890s,
commodity prices were still lower than they had been in 1865.
The fanners were not happy nor were they unsophisticated.
Greenbackers and Populists led by Harry Demerest Lloyd, Jerry Simpson,
Mary Ellen Lease and Ignatius Donnelly gave expression to an antideflationary eloquence and moral outrage. In the 1880s, muck-raking
journalists, health and housing reformers and an emergent labor movement
brought protest to the cities, often violently. The National Guard was called
out to aid Pinkertons in putting down labor unrest; there was localized civil
war at Homestead and Pullman.
The nation as a whole had experienced a long deflationary boom. But
not everyone benefitted. The rural and urban poor lived in squalor. The
corporations and the new corporate rich conspicuously benefitted from the
favors of the federal government. Aggrieved Westerners and agrarian
Southerners, together with .urban labor in the Midwest and East, were
�15
increasingly supported by conscientious middle-class city and small town ·.
p~ople.
Even in the East, as Populist refonn was modulated into a cooler
middle-class Progressivism, the people once again took matters into their own
hands. The Great Depression of the 1890s and bloody strikes persuaded
many that, as Ignatius Donnelly put it, the nation was dividing into tramps and
millionaires. The people in the middle feared both extremes, and increasingly
resented transfer payments to corporations from taxpayers implicit in
subsidies and high tariffs, and agitated for income taxes against both
-
corporations and individuals.
Popular outrage was in some places distracted into anti-Semitism {the
Protocols and the International Jewish Conspiracy), while in the South, poor
Whites were set against poor Blacks as Populism went racist. Jim Crow
practice became legalized, and there were race riots on the bread lines. There
was a massive change in popular feeling. And so the age of rebalancing and
refonn began after decades of resentment against enemies feared more than
government.
Already, public investment in education had nearly doubled between
1850 and 1900. Though the Interstate Commerce Act and the Shennan Anti.trust Act expressed a desire that the federal government counterbalance the
corporations, citizens did not yet expect the federal government to enter
�16
deeply into the economy. They banded together outside the government.
Grangers were numerous and union membership was five times in 1911 what
it had been in 1891. Reform in the 1890s was again led by women and clergy,
but unlike that of the 1840s, this time it did seek federal legislation. Child
labor and women's labor laws went on the books: the cry of "progressive""
people was ""investigate, educate, legislate, and enforce.""
Slums and slaughterhouses were exposed by Ida Tarbell as sinks of
disease. The Pure Food- and Drug Act was passed in 1906, after state laws
proved ineffective. Clergymen and William Booth of the Salvation Army
espoused a Social Gospel, and literature joined the fray. Donnelly, Upton
Sinclair, Jack London, and Carl Sandburg reinforced pamphleteers such as
'"Coin"" Harvey.
Populists, Republicans, Democrats and Progressives all responded to
these pressures, all turning to the Federal government to redirect the nation
toward greater social justice under Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft
and Woodrow Wilson. Their political leadership, combined with their ability to
exploit the fortuitous reflation (brought about by discoveries of gold in the
Klondike, Australia and South Africa) alleviated the violent expiation of social
distress in the 1890s, and permitted Progressivism to triumph.
�17
The Populist-Progressive-Wilsonian-New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society
tradition. was at first a reaction to a new central authority, perceived as
concentrated corporate power. The force of the Federal government was
invoked to counter what was felt to be corporate control of markets, especially
money markets, and to reallocate, to some extent, the fruits of the subjugation
of the continent.
(VII) 1928-1941 -The Second Great Depression, The New Deal and the Second
Great War
After the First Great War, "'the war to end wars"' and ""the war to make
the world safe for democracy"', "'Normalcy"' set in, a reaction against Wilson's
politics of collective morality and against federal authority except that
enforcing prohibition. Presidents Harding and Coolidge offered respite from
reform and from wars explained as moral imperatives. There was little federal
response to the precipitate decline of farm prices in the early 1920s, to
droughts, farm depression, and the consequent collapse of midwestern
banking in the middle of that decade. Instead, Federal monetary .authorities
accelerated the decline of the economy by monetary contraction. The middle
class was battered by the stock-market collapse of 1929, and the nation
prostrated by the Second Great Depression, even more fierce than that of the
1890s.
�18
The resulting unemployment was believed by President Hoover's
advisors to be beyond the reach of federal action. Nine thousand banks went
insolvent, nearly a quarter of the work force was unemployed, and gross
investment dropped by 98 percent Unemployed veterans marched on
Washington; Trotskyites rioted; Father Coughlin, Doctor Townsend, Gerald
L.K. Smith, Earl Browder and Huey Long acquired large followings for radical
measures. In the 1930s as in the 1890s, even among the great non.;radical
middling mass of people, distress was general enough to evoke a reliance
-
upon the Federal government
This was not true at first As Lincoln had come to power without
promising an erid to slavery, Franklin Roosevelt came to power espousing
less rather than more federal action. But as outcry became louder, he was
induced to recognize its fervor and direct it against "'malefactors of great
wealth"', who would otherwise stand in the way of fixing prices, providing
work relief, and forcing both monetary and fiscal policy to abate deflation.
Jane Addams, Frances Perkins, Harold Ickes, Lilian Wald and Eleanor
Roosevelt extended the fervor of the Progressive Era into the 1930s.
The political genius of Roosevelt created a system of balances:
corporate subsidies through the RFC, agricultural subsidies under the AAA,
minimum wages for the employed and work relief for the unemployed. His
�19
skill in giving voice to common concerns and antipathies brought an
abatement of the Second Great Depression without much violence, avoiding
the extreme outcomes of Fascism or Communism.
As in the 1890s, when gold-fueled reflation had assisted progressive
and non-violent political leadership, in the 1940s the Second World War
redeemed the New Deal. The intrusion of the federal government into wage
and price fixing during the war was far deeper than anything attempted by
NRA, CCC or AAA. International demand for food escalated fann prices;
unemployment declined from 10% as late as 1941 to reach near full
employment
in 1943.. GNP doubled during the war years.
.
In the 1930s the depression and ·the corporations had been feared more
than the government; in the 1940s so were the Nazis and Japanese. When
Republican convention votes were tallied, even the opposition to the New Deal
was found to have accepted its major premises. The Republicans brought
forth national leaders such as Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, and
Thomas E. Dewey, who accepted the vastly increased role of the federal
government in American life.
After the Second World War, fanners who in the 1930s had turned to the
federal government to sustain crop prices' at artificial levels still did so. Bank
�20
depositors, who in the 1930s had turned to the federal government for
insurance when banks went insolvent, still did so. The expected post-war
depression ·did not occur, in major part because huge federal subsidies built
highways and underwrote mortgages.
(VIII} -
The Sixties
Four streams of history came together in the 1960s:
* The quest for racial fairness in the face of the legacy of
race-based slavery;
* The American experience of having fought only a few large
wars and those few for recognizably moral ends. Wars of
ambiguous morality had been (a) relatively small in scale,
(b) brief, and (c) successful;
*The "liberal" tradition in economic policy, pitting the federal
government against large corporations and supporting
consumers against producers; what began in the 1890s was
playing itself out in the 1960s.
* And, women, lona the advocates of compassionate social
policy, acquired more direct, rather than derivative,
political power.
�21
The Civil Rights movement brought the unfinished moral implications
of racial discrimination to an intersection with the consequences of a mass
migration. Induced by two World Wars and the southern farm depression,
African Americans of the rural South, some of whom had never voted and
some who had lost the vote in the Jim Crow period, moved into the cities.
Their poverty was no longer dispersed and hidden in the Mississippi Delta, in
the sandhills and the swamps, and in the red-clay and piney woods of the
Piedmont. Concentrated in the cities, poor and disappointed people rioted.
Some part of their anger- arose from their knowing how badly off they were comparatively. Television informed them how other people lived.
Television also showed brutality at home and abroad during the Vietnam
War. War and the repression of civil protest came into the living room.
Whether at Kent State or. in Southeast Asia, the moral ambiguities of wartime
behavior could not be kept beyond the horizon. The Vietnam War may not
have been uglier or even less morally defensible than the Spanish American
War or the Iridian Wars, but it had come home from distant battlefields.
Through i~ all the great leaders of the 1960s, especially
Dr. Martin Luther King, were non-violent, drawing upon the moral tradition of
the Great Awakening, abolitionism and the Social Gospel. They invoked the
morality of public action, calling for federal protection for civil rights, voting
�22
rights and for equal opportunity. People of color knew that the Federal
government protected their marches and enforced the desegregation of
schools.
But the advocates of Civil Rights, with their federal allies, encountered
opponents. The federal government had since Reconstruction been perceived
as the enemy by Whites who did not wish to share either power or scarce
. jobs. Those disaffected joined in an aversion to federal action with those who
had lost their veneration for the unifonns of the federal service as a result of
the War in Vietnam. When Lyndon Johnson sought to extend the federal
"liberal" tradition in his Great Society economic policies, he encountered the
inflationary costs of an unpopular war. Inflation was a price people had been
prepared to pay for popular wars, but not for social reform atop an unpopular
war.
Society did become more inclusive. Civil Rights laws were passed. But
because of the Viet Nam War, the presidency lost prestige with liberals, even
as the federal government in general became increasingly anathematic to
people whose economic and social interests were threatened by the
President's domestic policies. Masses of Americans began to see central
authority to be less their friend than their enemy.
�23
PART TWO:
WHY ARE AMERICANS SO ANGRY?
In· the 1990s, once again, sides are drawn for or against the central
government. Some still rely upon federal authority and some are disposed to
rise up against it At the end of a period of indecision and inconclusion, the
I
fundamental disaffections among Americans are unreconciled. The nation
faces no identifiable and therefore unifying threat, either in foreign or
domestic economic policy~. We seem to be united only in our sense of
isolation from each other, from government, and from our civic institutions.
Despite composite economic numbers that chart apparent prosperity and
despite a cornucopia of time-saving appliances and leisure-time opportunities,
contentment does not reign. Instead, there is violence at the extref!1es and
distress in the middle of a volatile political environment
Volatility in a nation's political mood is to be expected in times of
change, but today that volatility is colored by ~ persistent pessimism. Many
are fearful about what change will mean for them. Many feel cheated; already,
change has left them behind as losers. Others are troubled by what they see
as the nation's unfamiliar and unwelcome moral course. To understand those
fears, resentments, and anxieties, it is useful to look at the human
implications of rapid societal change:
�24
1. The Economy: Most Americans have lost buying power over the last
several decades, while a few people have gotten conspicuously rich. Though
the public at large may not know the statistics, they feel angry and cheated.
A lower standard of living can be tolerated when everybody suffers, as
during a depression, but not while particular classes enjoy unprecedented
luxury. The world trumpets prosperity but mothers and fathers feel poor, and,
even worse, feel themselves to be failures, the first American generation
-
unable to offer its children a better life than their own difficult road. Many feel
wronged; for many, as well, resentment modulates into anger.
Many Americans also feel that it is unfair that corporations .down-size by
closing plants and lay off workers, while imperious executives, investment
bankers, lawyers and their stockholders reap huge windfalls. People are put
out of work or forced to take demeaning work. Families sacrifice in
desperation while money manipulators acquire fashionable wardrobes,
vacation homes, elite college admissions, and extended cruises. Is there any
wonder that people are angry?
Nor is there any wonder that amid the anger there is suspicion. People
are willing to believe that international economic powers and govem,ment
leaders are conniving to achieve a New World Order or a One World
�25
Government to enrich themselves and sell out working people. Anger and
suspicion are directed at the central government, and intensified by
accumulated· frustration with the massive and impervious bureaucratic
functioning of that government, explosions of violence are one way that .
people take matters into their own hands.
2. The State of Public Decency ·
There has been, of late, a widespread public impression that their own
-
government is complicitous in a general decline in decency, a loss of respect
for traditional norms of behavior. Television brings int~ the home li.bertine
lifestyles shocking to recollections of more dignified times. Americans who
came to maturity in World War II and had trouble adjusting to the 1960's are
affronted by the provocative public displays of Generation X: body piercing
jewelry, condom distribution, slam dancing, gangsta rap lyrics, punk dress
and designer drugs.
Beyond generati~nal differences and beyond disgust with deliberate
moral provocation, public anger has in recent years evolved into racial and
anti-urban antagonism. For more than a generation, political references to
crime epidemics have been deliberately conveyed via images of urban
populations, especially of threatening black inner city youth. The images have
stuck.
�26
To them have now been added the strange faces and voices of
Hispanics and Asians. Politicians have stoked fears of alien cultures
displacing Nonnan Rockwell's America. And so we get California's
Proposition 187, massive cuts in social programs, and a fearsome polarization
of our politics.
Real cultural change and politically generated antagonism have been
compounded by the clash of moral beliefs and technological possibilities.
The bio-sciences, particularly, now make possible advances which cross the
line from the territory of scientific inquiry into the field of faith. Questions of
~at is right and wrong replace questions .of what is possible.
· Everyday's newscasts confront people with the human dilemmas
attendant to surrogate pregnancies, assisted suicides, adoption rulings,
abortion, life support, organ transplants, and genetic engineering. It is as if
our capacity to comprehend within a religious system has fallen behind our
capacity to invent.
Our patterns of belief offer no finn answers; we are left feeling pangs of
conscience unresolved by any moral order. Things are just "not right".
And for many, there is just enough evidence that the federal
�~--
--
-----·---------------------------------,-------
27
government has contributed to the decline of decency, and is part of the
reason why things have become ..not right ... As a
co~sequence,
the
American meed to act does not express itself in a reliance upon the
government to act morally to achieve common purposes but, instead, in
searches for spiritual solace in non-governmental and often exclusive groups.
The explosive growth of evangelical Protestantism, of charismatic
Catholicism, of New Age publications, of Bible study fellowships, of men's
prayer groups, of Christian academies-all manifest a grasping for solid
--
moorings. Some seek decency in tradition; some seek it in new cults; all
aspire to a redemptive spirituality.
3. Bigness and Responsiveness
Americans have increasingly negative feelings about the large
institutions of modem society. Governmental bureaucracies growing out of
the New Deal and Great Society were tolerated as long as they produced
benefits people felt they needed, but poll after poll now display public
pre~erence
for government that is ""smaller and closer to the people"". While
we acknowledge that only large corporate organizations can mass produce
cars, connect cities with airline fleets, or finance satellite-based international·
communications networks, we are suspicious about the abuses of ~
corporations, about their impersonal
concentrated power they wield.
decision-making~
and about the
�28
Bigness, in American mythology, is bad. We celebrate town hall
government and volunteer fire· fighting. We may shop at Wai*Mart and Sears,
but we talk nostalgically about main ~treet and individual enterprise. We
recall neighborhood-based elementary. schools, family doctors, local church
fellowships, friendly and familiar barbers, mechanics, grocers, bankers and
insurance agents. But there .is more recollection of such intimate institutions
than experience with them.
Scale, population growth, concentration of financial insti~tions. and
technology have converged toward bigness. Churches with 5,000-person
congregations build convention-center sanctuaries. Chain stores, depots, and
multi-natio.nals clothe us, feed us, supply us with books, video rentals, athletic
gear, financial services and hotel accommodations •. A handful of companies
control the nation's air rou~s, airwaves, movie productions, and credit cards.
We know that bignesS and concentrated power cre~te great efficiencies but
we resent the loss of personal choice, of individuality, of human scale and of
human interaction.
It now appears, however, that the edges of this dilemma
can be softened. Some of the instruments of that softening arise out of
technology and the new modes of organization which technology makes
possible. Technology is providing more personally tailored conveniences and
�29
a wider range of service. It is possible, for example, to purchase an airline
ticket for a flight next month, and at the same time to order a special lowcholesterol meal and an aisle 1seat It is now possible to select nightly from 60
cable offerings in small communities, where, until now, there was only
network broadcast servjce or none at all. Cars, homes, clothing and personal
jewelry can be selected from television and ordered by computer.
In some aspectS of life, it now appears that we may be able to have it
-
both ways, enjoying the efficiency of bigness and the synthesized smallness
of tailored personal service. But not in government
Fro~
their government,
many Americans feel they experience the worst of both worlds: the
inefficiency of layered bureaucratic bigness and the impersonality of
impenetrable forms, preordained procedures, and one-size;..fits-all rigidity.
Governments dealing with multitudes of interactions with huge numbers
of people have developed habits hard to break down into the personally
tailored solutions now made possible by technology. Government continues
to reduce service to the lowest common denominator. People falling into the ·
mo~t
innocent tax discrepancies are intimidated because the IRS, the lowest
common denominator is Wrongdoing. Governmenfs contracting with its
customers is often adversarial in tone and inelastic to adjustments because
. the contracting officers' lowest common denominator is that one of those
�30
customers may ••game the system... Discretion and good judgment get
squeezed out; common sense is put on hold; the system assumes the worst.
Why? Because the scale of government is huge and liWe effort has been
made to break it down to manageable bites. Because the career penalties for
making a mistake are so much harsher than the infrequent rewards for doing
something new and better. Because any time one party (in this case the,
government) has unaccountable and unchecked power to take actions
blighting the hopes of othe~, human nature is storing up troubles.
As modem businesses produce, or approximate, tailored solutions,
government remains entiapped in ancient and implacable habits.· The
contrast is real and infuriating. On the one hand, market competition puts the
emphasis on service; on the other, government maintains those who stay
behind the counter, behind the regulations, and out of trouble. People
compare the systems, grow angry, become unwilling to expend their hard
earned money on taxes and lose faith in government.
Their anger, in a mild fonn, flows into anti-tax movements, home
schooling, flight to gated compounds in the suburbs beyond .the reach of city
governments, private neighborhood· patrols, and into government-limiting
referenda. In its most extreme fonn; the anger leads people to anned militias
and violence.
�--------------------
31
4. Community and Communication
Anger increases in the absence of a genuine community life. People
feel- isolated in suburbs without centers, travelling to work alone in locked and
air-conditioned cars distracted by radio talk, working in cubicles where many
perfonn solitary tasks at a computer tenninal. After work they drive home
. again past sealed tract homes with no porches, no stoops, no street life.
Instead of the chatter of neighbors there is only the clicking of the garage
door opener, an exhausted walk
int~
the kitchen and on to television and bed.
We may not greet a neighbor until the weekend - if then.
Those who travel rarely travel for real human interaction. We jet from
Atlanta at dawn to Los Angeles for a post-breakfast face-to-face meeting.
Ideally that would create more time for real human interaction. But, because it
is now possible, a business traveler will add a late afternoon meeting in Dallas
and be back in Atlanta by midnight, exhausted but deployable to
~ork
the
next morning. We feel separated from any true community life and so
pressured to meet our personal responsibilities that we cannot find time or
energy for civic obligations.
Many two earner households, or two-job individuals, working hard,
running fast on the economic treadmill, are too exhausted to coach the little
league team, lead a girl scout troop, attend a PTA meeting, or bolster a
�32
neighborhood association. What little time people have left after wage
earning and housekeeping goes to rest and recovery.
In an earlier era, relaxing could mean a talk on the front porch with the
neighbors
Oil'
a conversation over fishing poles. Now, for many, relaxation
means watching television. On television, we may observe events across the
world, but we do so alone and passively. We receive messages -continuous
and voluminous - but we are not required to form a coherent interpretation or
-
a thoughtful opinion as we would in conversation or in writing. We are drawn
from event to event, from statement to statement on the screen, without a
need for reflection. We are talked ·at, beguiled by a pattern of electrons. And
we sense that we are devalued, that someone else is shaping our reality, our
life, our civilization and our future. It is not an accident that today's
expression, "Get a Life.., is so frequently directed to people whose obsession .
with television leaves them as shadows in a world of sit-com characters and
imaginary friendships with celebrities.
Is it any wonder then why our civic discourse degenerates into a
competition 1for sound bites of sufficient shock value to penetrate the babble,
or why only a handful of volunteers can be recruited for civic projects at the
neighborhood school, or why people feel disconnected. That
disconnectedness is sourly expressed as corrosive criticism of other peoples'
�33
work, as the belittling of public duties and processes, as the dismissal of the
obligations of citizenship, and as a state of permanent resentment.
What are leaders to do to restore citizenship, civility, and community?
The final section of this paper offers some proposals toward these ends.
In an.enlivened American community, anger may be propitiated and
hope legitimated. The following pages offer some simple reassertions of
-
fundamental goals for government and society, an elaboration of several of
these, and finally a few examples of how these goals might be better brought
forward.
�34
PART THREE:
A COVENANT FOR THE AMERICAN FUTURE
1. We will guide the United States economy toward continued strong
economic growth to generate good jobs paying good wages. That means
steady progress toward a balanced budget and low interest rates, but it also
means investment in education, infrastructure and research.
2. We will work to include all Americans in an economy providing the
-
opportunity to work so that all can enjoy the benefits of economic growth.
3. We will establish high ground from which people can build their
lives. That means job retraining after job losses, training of undertrained poor
Americans for self-sufficiency, and targeted economic strategies for
distressed areas.
4. We will invest in world-class education at all levels to achieve global
leadership in advancing the frontiers of knowledge. We will resist attacks on ·
knowledge and skill, upon science, the arts and culture.
5. We will expand our commitment to our children and youth. The
beginning of nurturing and protecting the family values of our national family
is to nurture and pll"otect our children.
�35
6. We will protect our water, our air, our food,. our land, and our historic
heritage.
,,
"
7. We will work to reclaim our sense of safety and community peace.
We will protect our homes, streets, playgrounds and public spaces. We want
a law-abiding society and we want communities in which the right to personal
freedoms is balanced by the responsibility. for community peace.
8. We will recapture our politics from special interests by reforming
campaign finance laws and by creating new avenues for public engagement in
the nation's public life.
9. We will reduce the size of the entrenched bureaucracy and trust
those governments closest to the people in a partnership that balances
national standards of progress with local initiatives.
10. We will talk straight about the nation's future, about both its
fearsome challenges and its hopeful possibilities, about the trade-offs that
create both winners and losers. We will square with the people about the
reasons behind our decisions.
�36
A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT COMPONENTS OF THE COVENANT
1. lnvesbnent in Sustained Growth and Protecti.on for Americans who are
Hurt by Change
Sustained and broader growth provides jobs, markets, products, and
also the well-being which comes from a functioning system of finance and
invesbnent. . President <?linton's actions to assure steady long-:tenn economic
growth are absolutely correct and succeeding.
But, for too many Americans, winning the global economic battle feels
an awful lot like losing. Today's rising tide is not lifting all boats for it is not a
steady, predictable tide at all. It is more like a flash flood, a torrent of
· turbulent water. Some people are drowning; some are hanging on for dear
life; all need the respite of finn, high ground.
High ground is a place where you can get your footing. It is not the
same as a safety net into which people fall, but a place. to which people can
climb, on which they can build anew. We will provide more hope, and less
fear.
The high ground can take many fonils: re-training programs after plant
closings, educational vouchers for entire industry sectors, conversion
�37
programs after base closings, accessible and effective educational
investment, self-sufficiency strategies for poor families and dignity for the
most vulnerable. The President's insistence on investment and innovation in
these areas is entirely correct. The destructiveness of the Republican budget
cuts makes it imperative that the battle for these investments must be
intensified and the case taken to the American people.
An Example for the Covenant: Building up the High Ground
A full-fledged voucher system for training and retraining will give
Americans maximum choices in their search for the skills they need.
Training vouchers can be used as the core of military base conversion,
plant closing and lay-off recovery strategies, as well as for central city
youth and welfare-related work preparation.
The vouchers should be accompanied by an intensified emphasis
upon upgrading the quality of training institutions. Only the highest
rated institutions, ranked by community-based evaluations of their job
placement successes and evaluations by students and graduates, should
be eligible for the voucher program.
Economic development officials and employers should be ·made
part of the training evaluations, with a view toward linking the curriculum
directly to community economic development strategies and job
openings. Community-based participation can assure that recruiting of
students is credible within distressed neighborhoods~
2. Restoring Confidence in our Institutions
As we increase people's faith that high gro.und will be there for them we
must increase their confidence that the institutions they rely upon are
competent. Most Americans understand the basic fairness of providing
humanitarian assistance to Americans who are hurt by the turbulence of
�38
economic growth. But they do insist on effectiveness and results from the
institutions they support with their tax dollars.
At a time when people are afraid, when they need to trust, when
circumstances are beyond their control, when they are vulnerable, their faith
in government is undennined by incompetent programs and ineffective
institutions. The public interest in Ross Perot's message drives home the
urgency of restoring sense that government is clean, belongs to all of us, and
works.
At a time when the world's uncertainties derange the lives of average
families, Americans want their leaders to talk to them honestly, as .if they
mattered, as if they were intelligent and as if their aspirations were worthy.
This was the tone of President Clnnton's Georgetown University address and
of the New Hampshire conversation with Speaker Newt Gringrich.
An Example for the Covenant: Straight talk about the future from
the President
The guidelines for public discourse which President Clinton set forth in
the Georgetown University address catch the wave of what the public
wants. The Presidenfs positive sense of the New Hampshire conversation
with Speaker· Newt Gingrich conrectly gauges the public mood. President
Clinton is particularly qualified, because of the way he naturally analyzes
�39
multiple perspectives of difficult problems and because of his speaki~g
skill in calmly setting forth the dilemmas, to square with the American
people about the bad news and the good news in the challenges we face.
The President's warmth and, calmness are not minor assets. At a time
when the pell-mell rush of modem. life stretches the human body and the
psyche to the breaking point, the President's manner can suggest that
people slow down enough to think about the larger truths of our national
destiny.
At every opportunity the President should continue evidencing a
leadership of stable values. When everything else is changing confusedly,
people look to the leader for calming confidence and the affirmation of
enduring values. Strategies-and programs change, evolve and-adjust, but
they, like the Presidenfs reassurances, should be clearly rooted in
enduring principles and values. Among them, it is important to call forth
the tolerance and humaneness that run deeply in American culture and to
evoke a remembrance of history in order to make us proud of our common
achievements. The President did both these things superbly in the
Affirmative Action address.
3. There is Magic in Moving Power to the People
Americans are frustrated with the. big, unresponsive, wasteful
governmental institutions. They should be. A large, centralized bureaucracy
has been the bipartisan "public administration''
m~del
for sixty years,
steadily calcifying since the New Deal.
"Reinvention" was overdue when Vice President Gore gave it his .
focused energy, pressing administrators to use new technology, new
organizational concepts, new communications, new rules, and new partners to
·create a new model of public service.
�40
The key concepts are well known: perfonnance contracts must create
energetic partners rather than transfonn people into passive recipients;
greater choices and authority\ must be extended to partners and customers;
headquarters organizations must be much smaller, more dedicated to
teamwork than regulatory direction, and more focused on eliciting results than
prescribing processes; agencies must elicit participation and cease to reduce
their customers to dependency.
The most
effectiv~
way to breathe these concepts into life is to"
decentralize with a vengeance. We have done some of this, but now we must
more urgently extend power to localities and to local institutions. Local
public and private entrepreneurs, with the right incentives, can make two plus
two equal at least five.
There is irony in the fact that though Democrats trace our political roots
to Thomas Jefferson, in fact we have evolved over the last 60 years as the
modem defenders of the centralization espoused by his arch-opponent,
Alexander Hamilton.
Thomas Jefferson's emphases upon local responsibility, upon trusting
the people, and upon the corrupting effect of entrenched bureaucracies too
long in power,. all remain sound Democratic principles. Decentralization is as
valid an expression of public will in our complex modem society as it was in
Jefferson's America.
�- - - - - - - -
--
-
-
--
- - - - -
41
To be sure, Thomas Jefferson's principles were rooted in a much
I
simpler agrarian era. But, the point is that we Democrats have strayed a long
way from our roots. We do so at our peril because those roots run deep in
the American public psyche. We would do well .to nurture in our complex
modem society a new synthesis of public service that is based on
decentralization.
Creating the public service synthesis for the next century, for the
Information Age, for the era that must follow the New Deal consensus, is one
of the great opportunities before President Clinton. The legacies of
America's Presidents are fashioned from the hand of cards they are dealt, and
the cards are freshly dealt each two years. President Clinton's hand of cards
is different from what it seemed to be in January of 1993. The public's
disaffection is deeper than vie thought and the dema~d for change is more
uncompromising than we could have seen.
Reinventing a decentralized model of public administration responds to
what the pulblic wants, to the tradition of the Democratic party, and to what
new technology makes possible.
�-------------------
------
42
An Example for the Covenant:· Turning the Federal Government
""Right-Side Up'" and Trusting the People Closest to the Problems
The '"right-side-up'" cabinet deparbnent would literally invert the
organization chart, putting t;he federal representatives who meet the public
on the highest level and arraying every other function (logistical,
administrative, research, policy, and headquarters) in support of the frontline staff. Such an organization chart underscores the clear orientation of ·
federal deparbnents toward community service, local partnership and
problem solving.
·
It also serves as a constant reminder to the bureaucratic hierarchy that
their functions, no matter how glorified, are not the ultimate mission of the
organization. The ""strong points'" of the organization are field offices, to
whom more authority and latitude is delegated. The rest of the
organization, including the Secretary's office, stands behind those field
offices in support.
=
Ultimately, clusters of cabinet field offices can work together in
communities and serve as problem-solving teams, eliminating the
destructive turf boundaries that separate federal agencies in their work
across the nation and supporting local leaders in practical ways.
Modem teleconferencing and computer communications not
only allow the elimination of layers of bureaucracy, but also
make possible rapid, paperless transactions. In the private sector, some
U.S. insurance companies are now completely paperless: they receive
claims by phone, process them via computer-assisted evaluations, and
issue a check the same day. Not a single piece of paper has to be walked
up the organizational hierarchy. Paperless, electronically-wired
cabinet deparbnents with empowered field staff can approximate othat
efficiency in many transactions.
The need to perfonn at the "action end'" of the deparbnent requires
putting people where they are needed, empowering local offices,
·eliminating levels of hierarchy, speeding decisions, and preventing all the
counter productive by-products of traditi~nal ""top down" thinking.
4. Lifting up the Leaders the American People Know and Trust
The American people are not expecting that the federal government can
alone achieve the changes they desire. There is no longer much confidence
�43
that government can change itself, much less master the complex changes
confronting the society.
I
However, the American people do look to the President to lead the
nation through these changes; that is, to underStand them, to explain them, to
respond. · The American people, and clearly the new media, hold the President
accountable.
Only the President can summon, to aid in the task, the talents of
-
credible people from beyond the government, those who have earned the right
to be heeded.
The Presidency can speak through and be backed up by the leaders of
the great sectors of American life - religion, education, indusby and labor,
communications, finance, the arts and sciences.
It may be that some leaders identified with some of these sectors are
viewed skeptically by the public (few leaders are viewed unskeptically today).
Some have affinities to our political opponents. But our opponents have
chosen of late to alienate people in all these sectors. There is strength in
numbers and in a breadth of affirmation for Presidential decisions and
initiatives. Such affirmations can shape .Public confidence that the President's
judgments are backed by people of substance.
�44
Beyond engaging the support of people who are believed, the more
important task is to employ that support to actually manage change.
All across America - in churches, neighborhoods, small businesses,
non-profit groups, health care clinics, local governments, and
schools .- there are wonderfully creative institutions led by people who are
better educated than ever before, who prefer working at the grassroots level,
who .eschew the traditional routes of advancement to bigger institutions, and
who are full of good ideas about how America can manage change •. Many
--
know at least as much and are better positioned than the
organiza~onally
encumbered government in Washington. They are the ones who can reassure
people and help prepare the nation for change.
In these times more than ever, the people look to the President not
as the leader of the government, and even less as the leader of a political
party, but as a cultural leader whose principal business it is to bring people
together around the best approaches to master frightening change.
An Example for the Covenant: Reaching Beyond the Government
for Leaders of Change
Many of America's best leaders now believe that the era of the
centralized model of big government is past. They are pioneers in the
biosciences, communications, local· government, cybernetics, community
education, local human services, and businesses of all kinds. Their world
is far from the world of the central government's agencies and bureaus.
�------~
~---
---
45
They not only have working theories of change but are mastering and
harnessing change in their fields. In their worlds, they have immense
respect a111d are believed.
The President has tapped people such as these on such occasions as
the Little Rock Economic Summit and the regional economic summits.
These events have been perceived as primarily about the economy and
primarily for receiving infonnation. _The task now is to empower such
leaders to help lead a broader agenda of change and to help translate it
into working initiatives.
One approach might be to create a bi-partisan, public-private network
of people who have demonstrated insights about the changes confronting
our society. Foundation leaders could be invited to assist. in creating it.
Private groups of achievers, such as the Young President's Organization
and the existing scholarly and professional academies, could provide
support. Many names of people who have ideas that matter to the national
future come to mind, people whose principal ability has been to harness
workable principles in the new environment and take them to scale. They .
started small and accelerated to a network of size.
Here are some examples:
Bill Gates (software -Seattle);
·Jose Greer (community medicine -Miami);
Angela Blackwell (community strategies - Oakland and the
Rockefeller Foundation);
Mike White (Mayor of Cleveland);
Morton Meyerson (Co-founder of EDS, Dallas);
Michael Porter (business strategies - Harvard Business
School);
Hennelinda Septien (employment training - CET, San Jose);
Richard Riordan (Mayor of Los Angeles);
AI Neuharth (journalism - founder of USA Today);
Ted Turner (broadcasting - founder of Turner Broadcasting);
Emesto Cortes (community organizing - Texas);
Peter Lynch (finance - fanner manager of Fidelity Fund);
Andrew Young (business, religion, civil rights-Atlanta);
David Stem (Commissioner of NBA);
· Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines - Dallas);
Hedrick Smith (journalist, author);
Michael Dell (computer production -Austin);
·George Voinovich (Governor of Ohio);
�46
Nicholas Negraponte (MIT Media_ Lab);
Robert Johnson (founder, Black Entertainment Network);_
Billy Payne (founder, Atlanta Olympic Games Committee);
Wayne Huizenenga (Block Buster, sports, development Miami);
Spike Lee (film maker)
*
*
*
The pace of modem American public dialogue, accelerated as it is by
-
live cable coverage, radio call-ins, faxed newsletters, and mass telephone
barrages,_ hurries
decisio~s
and forces upon participants the sense that the
intensity is unprecedented. The pace is unprecedented, but American politics
lhave always been intense, and the people's impatience with government is
even older than the Republic. However, that does not require that
decisions be hastily made. Fortunately, we have memory, and, therefore,
history.
. Americans are eager for change, and anxious about change. We are
concerned about the state of our society, distrustful of
government'~
competence, and feel disconnected from our communities.
Our leaders must respond to those deep public feelings, not to
our opponents nastiness and barbs. The extent to which our program of
government responds affirmatively and ~ffectively to those profound public
emotions will determine whether the future is unstable and even violent
�47
or proceeds with national deliberation into the next century and
millennium.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Jonathan Prince
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Office of Speechwriting
Jonathan Prince
Date
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1993-1998
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<a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36296" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7763293" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
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2006-0466-F
Description
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Jonathan Prince served in various capacities during the two terms of the Administration. He was one of President Clinton’s speechwriters, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and directed the public relations effort related to the fallout from the bombing of refugees by NATO forces during the war in Kosovo. This collection consists his speechwriting files which contain speech drafts, handwritten notes, memoranda, correspondence, publications, and schedules. Prince wrote most of President Clinton’s radio addresses from 1993-1997. He also specialized in dealing with domestic issues such as crime, gun control, unemployment, urban development, and welfare.
Provenance
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Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
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187 folders in 11 boxes
Text
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Paper
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8/12/95 Henry Cisneros Memo
Creator
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Office of Speechwriting
Jonathan Prince
Identifier
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2006-0466-F
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
Box 4
<a href="http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/assets/Documents/Finding-Aids/2006/2006-0466-F.pdf" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7763293" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Adobe Acrobat Document
Medium
The material or physical carrier of the resource.
Reproduction-Reference
Date Created
Date of creation of the resource.
12/15/2014
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
42-t-7763293-20060466F-004-018-2014
7763293