THE UNFINISHED TASK

...This displacement must be an orderly process of movement to other jobs, of greater leisure without loss of income, of graduation into retirement...

...We must somehow bring our great strength and skills to bear on the massive task of shaping this global transformation, in order that the great changes now under way will expand rather than diminish the frontiers of freedom and human betterment...

...We rode this trend out of the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth Century, out of an age of innocence and confidence into an age of problems and world-wide responsibilities...

...Technology had to be crossed with human courage and sacrifice to produce what is now being called the affluent society...

...Technical innovations, particularly of such vast scope and potential as those related to atomic energy and automation, create but do not automatically satisfy mass desires...

...There are schools and hospitals to be built, highway systems and natural resources to be maintained and developed, and a vast program of foreign aid to be undertaken on a long-term basis...

...They obscure our present difficulties and future obligations by an implied comparison with less productive economies...

...We have tended to bank on a conviction that history handed us a blank check...

...We have discovered that we had no blank check...

...Such appeals are part of the general impulse to flee unpleasant realities—an impulse that has been deliberately cultivated by the conservative business forces that push and pull the present national Administration from crisis to crisis...

...I have the greatest confidence in the problem-solving capacity of Americans and in the future of free men...

...Adlai Stevenson traveled far and wide in Russia last year and brought back with him "an image of a vast, rich, underdeveloped country hard at work with single-minded purpose to build itself up to challenge America's world leadership...

...Our immediate challenge lies in the fact that we must not repeat it...

...There is a lot of unfinished business on democracy's agenda right here at home...

...If we persist in wage, price, and profit policies set by the old assumptions and standards, to produce substantial corporate profits at much less than capacity production, we condemn ourselves in advance to an America too weak to shoulder its world responsibilities...

...It is their meaning for today and tomorrow that calls for a closer look...

...The quest for abundance has taken a new turn...

...Automation and atomic power have destroyed every prospect of continuing in the old way...

...The opening out of American life that we have known is a result of these complex forces and movements...

...They provoke but do not themselves resolve social tensions...

...Only a full mobilization of our democratic resources will be equal to that task...

...The old notion that we can make progress in a vacuum in this country, regardless of the life expectancy of Asians or the national aspirations of Africans, won't do it either...

...I think it is because the real problem—the relatively greater speed of Soviet technological development—cannot be overcome by a spending program alone...

...The Progressive movement and the New Freedom, the New Deal and the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930's—these currents and instrumentalities of reform took the raw energies of the nation and shaped them to meet needs and satisfy aspirations that had been ignored or defied by the captains of industry and the unreconstructed free enterprisers...

...It is in this realm of value and commitment that our problems reside...

...If we want freedom to prevail in the world we must not—we cannot— keep them waiting...

...A flight into the national past under such auspices is a flight into irresponsibility...

...When we speak of the full range of American experience, of present difficulties and future obligations, we move quickly away from neat and manageable figures...

...That is why, when the alarms are sounded, we turn over and go to sleep again...

...There are wide areas of public interest where needs cannot be met by the private sector of the economy and where public initiative at federal, state, and local levels, usually in conjunction with private enterprise, is necessary...

...We must not sell America short by looking to the past for our standards of performance...

...We must develop programs to help small business overcome its increasing disadvantage as the new technology, with its greater demand on capital investment funds, favors the larger firms, making bigness bigger...

...We live in a world where a billion people go to bed hungry every night...

...But all mankind cannot now be served, given the uneasy relationship between technical possibilities and social fulfillment...

...This is not exactly news to the American people, but thus far their response to the situation has not been clear...

...Our essential freedom consists in the fact that we need not repeat such a pattern...

...By that measurement of national and world responsibility in the age of space and atomic energy, we are in trouble...

...recessions, depressions, and war...

...It is in the area of directing the explosive forces of technology and science—in the realm of social imagination and sensitivity to human values in an age of mass organization—that the future will be shaped for better or worse...

...The new technology has increased our capacity to produce out of all proportion to our achievement in the area of distribution and consumption...

...Not all of the mechanical gadgets that will make life easier for ourselves and our fellow human beings around the globe, nor even an increase in total food supply where there are shortages, nor making available adequate medical care to prevent or cure the diseases that afflict much of mankind, nor the raising of the level of education—all of these will not convince the peoples of the underdeveloped nations of the world that the democratic way of life is the best for them and their future generations so long as the ugly incidents in Little Rock, Birmingham, and Montgomery still stain and pervert our pattern of democracy...

...It shocked enough Americans out of the habit of taking economic activity (of the prosperous and profitable kind) for granted to make possible the positive government of the New Deal and the insistence on economic democracy at the plant level that sparked the drive of the CIO...

...They are the stuff of our common experience and memory...

...We brush up against matters not so much of statistical measurement as of human value, of personal and social WALTER REUTHER is president of the United Automobile Workers of America and vice president of the AFL-CIO...

...We have nothing to say to these people unless we can do, not as well, but much better than we have ever done here at home...

...The would-be beneficiaries of the industrial revolution are no longer restricted to a few favored nations...

...These nostalgic and self-congratulatory recitations of American progress are based for the most part on unassailable fact...

...We live in a time of continental revolutions...

...that we could not draw endlessly and mindlessly on the blessings of nature, the accidents of geography, and the notions about human nature and economic activity that had made sense in the Eighteenth Century world of Adam Smith...

...In the last Presidential elections a fleeting political majority came together long enough to return a military hero to the White House, partly out of gratitude and respect, partly as an impulsive flight from the global burden that seemed so uncomfortably and unfairly at odds with our domestic prosperity...

...This is the constant refrain . . ." Business-as-usual in the United States will not save American and world democracy from the power-political implications of the rising Russian curve...

...It must not be a casting aside of the old or the untrained...

...Free men cannot afford to rest on their laurels or take their privileged position among the nations for granted...

...We have made the bitter discovery that American democracy and American industrial society cannot live in a vacuum, cushioned from the shocks and trends that are transforming the world...

...they need not go against the free institutions of the West in the short run if we can show that we stand for something better than the West ever offered before...

...It is not so much the facts of the story that are in question...

...Our ability to produce in geometrically increasing quantities more automobiles, more electric refrigerators, more television sets, and more and higher skyscrapers do not impress the rest of the world unless it is accompanied by the attainment of higher cultural levels and a broader and more sympathetic understanding of and participation in the struggle for real human happiness and spiritual satisfaction...

...We have been obliged to assume this burden at home and throughout the world as a direct result of the national power and wealth created by American energies and talents...

...Technological advance is not an end unto itself...

...Earlier retirement means that we must have a more generous program of pension and social security benefits...

...There are degrees of power and influence, and degrees of responsibility...

...In any consideration of these facts of life, the statistics of American growth in the last 50 years do not have the meaning they are usually given in management-oriented literature...

...To go by the standards of the past is to sell ourselves short and to foreclose the future...

...We have clung so stubbornly to the notion of the individual as the prime mover in economic activity that we have blinded ourselves to the predominant role of large corporations, basing much of our law on the fiction that they are not institutions but persons...

...Around the time The Progressive was born, the more sensitive and socially-responsive Americans were becoming disturbed by the degree to which technology and industrialism had transformed our agrarian society, creating new empires in the modern corporation and a new class of disenfranchised citizens, the industrial wage-earners, who bore the burdens of progress without being represented in the making of the economic decisions that shaped their lives...

...They will not wait on the gradualism of impersonal and unstimulated evolution...

...And when I speak of our capacity to consume I am thinking not only of material well-being within our borders but of contributing to a rising standard of living throughout the world...

...But what the experts call the missile lag is essentially a weakness in American education and a lack of seriousness in American national purposes, when there is choice between private pleasures and the public interest...

...The old relationship of production and consumption will not do what we have to do...

...We face a growth of our labor force, at the same time that automation displaces manpower...

...It was this price-fixing of the largest corporatitons, over the head of Adam Smith, without regard to unit costs and in defiance of the law of supply and demand, together with economic policies of the Republican Administration that acquiesced in and favored such corporate license, that produced the recession...

...It is not taken for granted by the millions who have for the last several centuries suffered the yoke of Western imperialism and white supremacy, and who just now, for the first time since the former glories of the ancient cultures, are tasting the heady wine of political independence...

...The Nineteenth Century expansion and westward movement might have appeared, at least in retrospect, to have been a fairly simple, linear progression westward and upward from plateau to plateau of manifest destiny...

...We must pay more attention to training and re-training...

...We need to broaden areas of understanding and minimize areas of conflict...

...The Russians are forcing the pace of change...

...And to sustain this faster growth, we must have a different relationship between wages, prices, and profits than has lately prevailed under the dominance of corporate oligarchy and political reaction...

...Our great need here at home is not to have more of the same progression that we knew in the past...

...The 1958 recession, Russian advances in space, and the ineptness of Republican diplomacy destroyed the facade of complacency erected by the "modern" Republicans to hide the facts of life from the American people...

...We are engaged in a kind of sudden-death play-off with the Kremlin for the allegiance of these and other millions...

...They perpetuate the myth of an economic man and a round of economic activity divorced from the broader and deeper sweep of national experience...

...Every economic, political, military, or diplomatic problem we face today as a people derives from some moral dilemma, some confusion or failure in the domain where ideals are not transmitted into practice...

...there is today no land and no people left untouched by the radical belief that all men are created equal or by the equally unsettling knowledge that machines can do the work of men...

...It has not recently been managed well, either in the public or in any long-term interest...

...If we are living today on a capital of ideas that has reached the stage of depletion, if we as a nation are ducking or ignoring the essential challenges, if we are not reacting as we should to Russian strength and weakness, prime responsibility does not rest primarily with the unemployed worker, the housewife, or the Negro student...

...One of the greatest ironies—and to free men greatest challenges—is that this great nation of ours has lately been drawn, as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr put it, "into an historic situation in which the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity...

...That one measurement is the burden of the responsibilities we have assumed as a people...

...The last 50 years—the lifetime to date of The Progressive—can be read to advantage as a record of the progressive struggle to convert the pure-and-simple, business-is-business sector of the country to a greater understanding and more consistent performance of its social responsibility...

...Scarcity and the increasing cost of labor, the latter being essential to a rising standard, put a premium on efficiency, on technology...

...They don't bring home to us the uniqueness of the challenge we face precisely because of that achievement...

...It would be quite easy to push Congress into new and bigger expenditures...

...Quick-moving statistical treatments of the last half-century, usually at the hands of management-minded persuaders declared and hidden, distort the past...

...Our last, best hope is to achieve a more dynamic relationship between our great national capacity to produce and our lagging capacity to consume...

...The people who have waited for centuries to inherit their share of the world's goods of health and dignity and political and economic freedom are impatient...

...We shall not be able to help him unless we can free ourselves from old standards of performance, unless we understand that our present rate of national growth, judged not by the past but by present and future needs, is too slow...

...An affluent society, to be sure, where the lessons of the past and the imperatives of the present have been so imperfectly learned that our vast productive machine could not offer employment to millions of workers in 1958 and where in the summer and fall of that same year the major employers of one of our basic industries refused for months to bargain with the certified union of their employes...

...Such confidence, however, rests on the assumption that we will confront our problems squarely, that we will assume the responsibilities that go hand in hand with freedom...

...Overtake, catch up, compete— beat the United States...

...The Great Depression that began in 1929 was a major turning point...

...It rests primarily with those in positions of power and trust in our society, who are the carriers of the old ideas because they see in them a means of perpetuating their power...

...It is to resign ourselves not only to a repetition of the long-term progress of the past but to its short-term setbacks as well...

...We were relatively free to expand westward, creating a continental market...

...We can still point to statistics of gross tonnage to comfort ourselves with the thought that we have yet to- be overtaken in the race, but we cannot gainsay the rising curve of Russian growth...

...We had a deadlock in auto negotiations caused by refusal of the major companies to bargain...

...The widely-syndicated conservative expert on world affairs, Walter Lippmann, raised a fundamental question last fall when he considered what he regarded as a failure of both major political parties to develop an adequate program to meet the international thrust of the Soviet Union...

...This fleeting majority grasped at the straw of Eisenhower optimism, but did not believe in it enough to back it with a Republican Congress...

...A nostalgic appeal to past trends offers no guarantee for the present and future...

...Isolated from the full range of American experience and locked in a vacuum of strident optimism, the statistics of American material progress during the last few decades become a kind of science-fiction, a nursery rhyme for the organization of man...

...Such comparisons point to the uniqueness of our achievement...

...The cow of American material well-being jumped over the moon of abundance...

...If we leave our progress in these human and social areas to the snaillike pace of business-as-usual evolution, the process will take time—too much time...

...We are in competition with a new society which is in deadly earnest, and there is no use pretending that amidst our comforts and our pleasures, we are serious enough...

...commitment...

...We have had enough practical experience in the last half-century with the combined working of the public and private sectors to be able to do what has to be done in these areas without tying ourselves into ideological knots and losing sight of our common objectives...

...It rests primarily in those conservative business leaders and politicians who see America in the image of their fears and antagonisms rather than in the image of our hopes and possibilities...

...Properly managed, the American economy could be freedom's greatest material asset...

...It is not a question of their following Alaska into the union, but of their taking their rightful place in a free world community based on the diversity of peoples...

...It is easy but futile to indict a whole society...

...for a long time that conviction seemed to make common sense...

...This is not said in defeatism...

...Responsibility for our present predicament cannot be cast like a net over all our people, the corporation president and the fellow who has just been laid off, the governor of Arkansas and the Negro student, the Secretary of State and the housewife...

...Lippmann wrote: "Why is it like that...

...We have to understand that the average Asian and African has little to celebrate in his immediate past...

...In this movement toward greater responsibility, the wage-earners, through their unions and through their votes, played a crucial role...

...We are not going to extricate ourselves from these problems by celebrating in bare statistical fashion our material progress in the first half of this century...

...We had a severe recession in 1958, while prices continued to rise...

...We must raise our sights...

...The past 50 years have added to this linear progression a groping inward and downward, an exploration in depth of democratic possibility, a gradual development of national self-awareness to match our mounting national wealth...

...We have to find a new relationship because we have crossed a new frontier in technology...

...We started more or less from scratch on a virgin continent...

...Until the first Sputnik temporarily jarred our complacency, we never really believed that the United States had been or could be challenged on our own ground of industrial1 production...

...we conspire in a Russian conquest of the have-not world through democratic default...

...At home we have stretched our Eighteenth Century notions about man and his economic activity so far into the different world of the Twentieth Century that they are now endangering rather than sustaining basic freedoms...

...A new consciousness of united strength arose among the industrial workers...

...The clientele of industrialism now includes all mankind...

...A simple-minded faith in the promises of technology based on the myth of an automatic trend onward and upward with the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce will not do this job...

...Stevenson said further: "The whole gigantic power apparatus—education, science, industry, agriculture and administration—is harnessed with ruthless, concentrated purpose for increased production, higher living standards, security, power, and influence...

...To do these things we must grow at a faster pace than we have grown in the past...

...We had Congressional inquiries into the practice of price setting by quasi-monopolistic corporations in auto and other basic industries...

...The revolutions are really against poverty and misery and disease...

...Out of the great external dangers and out of our own great inner ; resources as free men, we can summon the strength and wisdom to convert an unprecedented challenge into an unpara-lelled opportunity...

...On that basis, the Russians have already won and need only cash in their chips...

...There are slums and substandard housing in both rural and urban areas to be replaced...

...They do not come to us neatly packaged with the required increment of social wisdom...

...The facts need hardly be recited within the national family...

...It is not a question of their joining our alliances, but of their going in a democratic direction...

...And technology led to bigness...

...For much of the Nineteenth Century we were able to live in splendid isolation from the troubles of the rest of the world...

...We must shape policies in the knowledge that free labor and free management are less antagonists than partners, that they have more in common than in conflict...

...We must do these things as the prelude to an all-out exercise in the economics of abundance, for ourselves and for the sake of the millions that go to bed hungry at night, lest they wake up some morning with the delusion that communism is their way out...

...Abroad we have similarly drifted along, during the Eisenhower years, on a notion of American supremacy and a system of alliances designed to perpetuate acquired positions, a notion and a system that no longer respond to power relationships or the revolutionary movement of peoples in Africa and Asia...