THE GREENING OF AMERICA by CHARLES A. REICH

[islandboy]

The most profound impact of the commodity system and technology was on man's own individual being. The visible ravaging of the land and the social fabric was matched by an invisible ravaging of man within. Man was not merely alienated from environment and society, he was alienated from his own functions and needs. His principal activity--work--ceased to be self-expression. He felt little of the normal satisfactions of work; he was a mere cog in production; his tasks no longer expressed his abilities. Man's most basic activity was dominated by the most impersonal of masters--money. Man became alienated from himself as money, not inner needs, and increasingly his wants became subject to outside manipulation. Losing both his work-essence and his need--essence, man was no longer a unique individual but an extension of the production--consumption system.

[islandboy]

The second effect of industrialism was on the American political and economic system. It is worth recalling the nation's constitutional scheme. The central idea was individual sovereignty. The framers of the Constitution were men who deeply feared power, believed that any and all power corrups, and rejected the idea of any form of power over individual lives. They laid their strictures against all the types of power they knew about or had experienced. The plan was to divide power, limit it, and subject its use to many sorts of safeguards. All power was limited to that specifically granted. Thus the framers showed their conviction that power of any sort was the chief evil that could beset any people. Democracy was also a part of the plan, and with it the concept that the people were the ultimate and only sovereigns, This scheme of government went along with an economic system which at temped to embody the American dream. It sought to make it possible for every American citizen to achieve personal economic independence, ownership of his own land and home, and an opportunity to define and engage in work of his own choosing. Within this plan there was, of course, room for some people to become rich, some to remain rich, and others to remain or become poor. But this was thought necessary for the over-all objective of personal independence. The frontier lay open; opportunity was to be found on all sides; no laws restricted freedom of movement; there was virtually unlimited freedom to define "the pursuit of happiness" in any manner that might seem fulfilling to the individual concerned. It was not so for long. The forces of the market and technique were oblivious to the individual pursuit of happiness.

[islandboy]

Consider the factory system, in which technique dictated the organization and specialization of labor, and where the market forced long hours, low wages, and a precarious security. The early miseries of factories have often been recounted; what needs to be seen here is the contrast between the factory system and the ideals concerning independence, for the factory worker was subject to overwhelming power over his life. He was rigidly disciplined. His hours, his conduct, his meals, his clothes, ultimately his friendships and thoughts were all controlled. Cities developed to house factory workers, and the cities demanded a limitation of freedom in living arrangements almost as great as that of the factory itself. Of course, no one "needed" to work in a factory or live in a city. But gradually, as the decades passed, the alternatives narrowed. Not everyone could any longer be a pioneer, settler, farmer, or individual craftsman.

[islandboy]

For employees, whether of a factory, a business concern, or a large-scale farm, sovereign independence largely ceased to exist in practice. The power exercised over their lives was not constitutionally limited, or divided, or subject to checks and balances; no bill of rights or court protected them. No democracy existed for the employee; he was not consulted about any decision, however vital to his own life. Nor was there , for the vast majority, any hope of success; their hopes were limited to the chance to find a place within a powerful structure, and although a few did rise, the dream was realized only for those few. What was supposed to be a chance for all was now statistically impossible for most. Even more drastic, perhaps, was the loss of the pursuit of self-fulfillment. For the employee could no longer define his own quest. The kind of work he did, the manner in which he did his work, his opportunities for expression, leisure, and play were all subject to external power.
The discipline to which the worker fell subject was a harsh one. He worked long hours which absorbed nearly all of his time and energy. He was cut off from fresh air, nature, and beauty, and confined to a machine-interior. His housing was little more than an extension of the factory itself, barracks jammed together without amenities of any kind. His movements were closely regulated on the job, and what was "free" became a conventionalized movement to and from the factory, plus the motions of eating, sleeping, procreating at home. The worker was deprived of his role as a father, and this function turned over to wives and to public schools.

[islandboy]

Independence was replaced by a grumbling servility; the worker must submit to the authority of the bosses; all sense of power and potency passed out of his hands. His mind was not wanted, nor his judgement, nor his imagination. His sense of design, of rhythm, of music, of craftsmanship were rejected. Boldness, courage, leadership, fun, play, kindness, affection, had no place in the discipline of the factory or the office.
The authority of the industrial rulers was different from the rule of the southern slave owners, but in some ways it required an equally great submission, an equally great loss of human possibility. We have often spoken of the industrial worker as a wage slave. But this imposes a narrowly economic view on his condition. His mind, his spirit, his personality, his human functions were chained as well, and, like the sad, yearning, awkward, speechless monster created by technology in the film Frankenstein, he was irrevocably cut off from the circle of humanity.

[islandboy]

Growth of power over individuals was matched by the growth of power on a vaster stage. After the Civil War the country entered a period of business mergers, consolidations, and monoplies. This resulted in a gradual destruction of the free market, and the assumption of corporate power to plan the economy, allocate resources, divide areas of business activity, fix prices, limit entry of new businesses, and (although this was still far off) control the buyers themselves. A small group in steel and railroads, another group in oil, another in finance, became rulers of nation-states, controlling economic forces, in some ways as tightly as any socialist country has attempted to do.

[islandboy]

The power that now was assumed, from regulation of the factory worker to regulation of the market, was power that had not previously existed in anyone's hands in America, if anywhere in the world. Thus it was not a seizure from someone else, but the subjugation of a previously free people and a previously free economy. It was, in the most literal and true sense, a conquest of the American nation.
The new lords arrayed themselves in the trappings of royalty. Monarchical homes were built, with furnishing suited for, and sometimes actually purchased from, the European aristocracy. The library-offices of J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, both still perserved in New York, resemble nothing so much as two imperial throne rooms. And the American language quickly recognized the realities of the loss of democracy; there were copper "kings" and railroad "barons," an American aristocracy. The American people, who had fled the monarchies of Europe, had only a few decades of freedom before they were conquered by a set of autocrats wielding, if anything, greater power than the old.

[islandboy]

But these were not merely the triumphs of certain successful individuals over their fellow men. From a longer perspective we can see that the seizure was also a triumph of impersonal forces--the forces of organization, efficiency, technology, planning; the forces of modern rationalism and scientific management. John D. Rockefeller was as impersonal as a mathematical formula--he was the embodiment of technique, efficiency, and, above all, of economic planning. He was the apostle of collectivism, ending individualism in the oil industry and replacing it with a centralized, planned, collective enterprise. Of course he and others were rapacious, ambitious, ruthless; but these qualities--and even more so the individual buccaneering and piracy that characterized the great age of robber barons--obscured the longer-range thrust of the times. The cold and calm Rockefeller, a true business scientist, expresses what was happening far better than some frontiersman-turned-millionaire who kept his vitality and his largely irrational ways.

[islandboy]

The true ethic that transformed America was not the ethic of piracy and rapacity standing by its self, but that of power joined to repression and order. Organization and efficiency repressed unruly, undisciplined life. It substituted the clean, spare, inhuman direction of affairs for random, spontaneous burgeoning of life that seemed so typical of frontier America. The forces of market exploitation and technology, active through them, cut down democracy, independence, and the pursuit of happiness, and fostered instead a new managerial order, a hierarchy of power and privilege that replaced communal values with antisocial "success" and inhuman science.
Looking back, it can be seen that the forces loosed on the world at the beginning of the modern era had the potential to create all kinds of troubles which beset us today: lawlessness and disorder, because the basis for social order was destroyed; destruction of environment and culture by exploitation; threats to democracy and liberty, because man was subject to the impersonal lordship of an economic and technological system; loss of values as all values became subject to manipulation. If Americans were to preserve their dream of a republican form of government and individual economic sovereignty, as well as the environment of their lives, they would have needed to understand the forces that were threatening them, and take action to assure that these forces worked for, not against, the American dream.

[islandboy]

Consciousness I was unwilling or unable to comprehend the transformation of America. Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth. Americans (became) obsessed by the need to move-move-move. They tore down buildings before the building could acquire  meaning and tradition; they allowed commerce and engineering to dominate principles of architecture and city planning; they were uprooted from everything. In consequence they prevented anything interior or private from forming, anything traditional from being carried along, and all is change made individuality increasingly impossible to maintain. The momentum of change swept the people along so rapidly, with so little chance to become individually self-conscious, that people were cut off from their own history. Americans were a people who had lost their identity. Their past traditions had vanished into the melting pot, their present was in flux, and no repose or reflection existed to permit the formulation of a concept of self. Innocence, self-interest, and shallowness combined in Consciousness I to produce a massive flight from responsibility and from awareness. There is a quality of willful ignorance in American life---ignorance of existing injustices, such as the treatment of the black minority, ignorance of the causes of social problems, ignorance of the world.

[islandboy]

Americans demanded the superficial "normalcy" of the Twenties or the Fifties; they were willing to see the news about their government come to them in the form of tabloid or television entertainment; they tolerated ignorance and incompetence in high office; and when something went wrong, it was childishly blamed on "them." Politics early became the realm of untruth, and it has stayed that way ever since. That politician was elected who painted the most untrue picture of America, who took us farthest from the changes that were actually taking place in America.
Although many writers saw these aspects of the American character, few realized what we are now able to see--how disastrous the shortcomings of Consciousness I would prove to be. Americans have no understanding of the dangers of industrialism, they possess no set of values to oppose those of industrialism; no culture, tradition, social order, or inner knowledge of self by which to guide industrial values and choose among them. Moreover, Americans could not rise to a level of community responsibility in the face of the dangers of industrialism. Divided up into individual units defined by self-interest, they had no way of thinking for the common good, or thinking ahead, and the anti-intellectual and sometimes childish tendency of Americans not to think at all allowed them to rest easy in this posture.

[islandboy]

Consciousness I has been, and continues to be, utterly unable to come to terms with the realities of private power created by industrialism. Although opposition to power is part of the essential American idea, Americans have watched corporations acquire power to plan the economy, to decide what is to be produced, to fix prices, to regulate essential services, including the distribution of news and information (so vital to the working of a democracy), and to regulate the lives of workers, without taking effectual steps to cope with any of it. Antitrust, collective bargaining, and utility regulation were some of the measures eventually taken, but, as we shall see in the (coming) chapters, they were not effective. Consciousness I could not grasp, or could not accept, the reality that the individual was no longer competing against the success of other individuals, but against a system. It could not understand that "private property" in the hands of a corporation was a synonym for quasi-governmental power, far different from the property of an individual. It could not understand the crucial point that collective action against corporate power would not have been a step toward collectivization, but an effort to preserve democracy in a society that had already been collectivized.

[islandboy]

Consciousness I also failed to recognize that private production was not paying its costs. For example, a manufacturer would dump its wastes into a stream but pay nothing on account of the pollution, leaving the public to share in the costs but not in the profits. The manufacturer fought against having to pay for accidental injuries to workers, although these were statistically predictable, leaving the costs to be borne, sometimes for a whole lifetime, by the unfortunate individual and his family. Unemployment, old-age insecurity, and inadequate education for an advancing technology were part of the price of manufacture, and should have been rectified through taxation. But the relationship between the corporation and society was not recognized.
Most characteristic of all, Consciousness I insisted on seeing the ills of industrialism not for what they were, but as moral problems. If a given number of automobiles are crowded onto a highway, there will be a predictable number of accidents. The moral approach tries to deal with this as a question of individual driver responsibility. It stresses safe driving and criminal penalties. Yet reduction of the accident rate is demonstrably a problem in engineering. Similarly, urban crime is seen as a moral and law enforcement problem, although crime is a product of identifiable environmental factors. The moralistic approach to public welfare is similar. Over and over again, Consciousness I sought scapegoats rather than face the forces of industrialism directly.

[islandboy]

If the people would not dominate the forces that were changing their country, then those forces would dominate the people. Consciousness I, losing its own roots but holding tight to its myths, was ready game for manipulation by the organized forces of society. These Americans could be sold a colonial war in the name of national honor. They could be sold hundreds of billions of dollar's worth of military technology in the name of American independence. They could be sold governmental irresponsibility in the name of the old American virtue of thrift. They could be sold an ignorant and incapable leader because he looked like the embodiment of American virtues. Worst of all, perhaps, they could be sold artificial pleasures and artificial dreams to replace the high human and spiritual adventure that had once been America.

[islandboy]

It would seem that given the way our government is now, compared to the time of the great depression, we have come full circle. Socialism again is knocking at the door. People are in dispare; lack of jobs and dwindling money supplies, scare tactics, more big government take overs. Do the people have the willpower to fight this? Or are we too weak and spineless to stand up and defend the United States of America.

I had a thought the other day that if when churches in America are threatened by lawsuits from anti-American groups or in many cases one person and they drop their traditions out of fear of loss, would it not be prudent if every church in American stood up and behind those churches, i would bet the anti-anything crowd would back down in a hurry. The same goes for towns being threatened or anything that removes the rights of the American people and the words of God, or our Constitution, from our lives. Now wouldn't that send a message loud and clear about who we are and what we believe in.