The Dark Side of Two American Dreams

...Fuchs has construed the choice by lumping the whole notion of independence with that peculiar brand of spoiledness in which a person feels that any demand which compromises his or her freedom to do what he or she wants is grossly “unfair...

...In pressing his case that the philosophy of independence is the conditioning which has led Americans to unquestioningly assume that attachments beyond immediate family are not only dispensable, but are potential threats to the inalienable right to do your own thing-and hence the sterile, isolated nuclear family-Fuchs takes on a pantheon of early Americans as his adversaries...

...In the introduction to the Modern Library collection of Thoreau’s works, Brooks Atkinson writes of the author’s parents, also, of course, citizens of Concord: Being practical people, they may have hoped to have him succeed in one of the established professions, as other good students generally did...

...The enemy is in people who try to force upon you their idea of what you should be...

...probably they always understood his potentialities and admired his vital integrity, and it is certain that they loved him with the warm affection of a family that lived on intimate terms...

...In many ways staying put has little value if everyone around you is moving...

...A tendency to take feminism in its most superficial sense and then discredit it should also be mentioned...

...Pioneering has degenerated into emigrating, but when people take off for other places, their decision is still likely to be perceived as a positive one, evidence of an appetite for challenge, and any number of other pioneer virtues...

...They are almost abstractions of the ideal Mom, Dad, Dick, and Jane nuclear family...

...They were people of intelligence and principle...

...Bringing Hogarth Home Another writer has identified a major influence in the creation of the scene Packard describes...

...They represent the extreme of independence, in which independence is inverted and becomes passivity and self-determination transforms into a senseless, tumbleweed-like existence...

...The alternative concept is to work with what you’ve got because even a dismal slum has an inner balance and culture which is irreplaceable...

...The idea that it is selfdefeating to knock everything down and start all over or find an empty spot-new territory-and try to build the perfect arrangement has been current in urban renewal circles for some time...

...people to make it on their own led young couples to leave the bosom of extended families, and thus began the nuclear family...

...and, because they know they will have to sell fast, people subordinate personal taste to necessity and buy the most conventional houses with the result that their homes, like their ever-replaced friends, are interchangeable...

...McKay, $7.95...

...Self-sufficiency was to be encouraged, dependency discouraged, thus reinforcing the child’s desire to repeat the parents’ pattern and “get out” as soon as he or she was grown up...

...Incidentally, it is curious that the same people who see extended family obligations as hindrances have widely accepted the idea that taking on added responsibility in their work will make it richer, more lively, and more worthwhile...

...Architects and urban planners are beginning to put their minds to finding alternatives’ to cellular units in one-layer communities, and the corporate policy of moving personnel is beginning to come under public criticism...

...The landscapes dotted with “homes” have become little more than rows of huge motels, with first, second, and third-class sections occupied according to what income stage the occupants have reached...

...Beholden to no one but themselves, their lives are perfectly self-enclosed, their transience cutting off the last outside support, a community of friends and neighbors...

...Perhaps the tendency to seal off family life from work so absolutely that they relate only in competition with each other is one of the forces which has built the world described in Packard’s book...

...But both hit the nail on the head, albeit with rubber hammers, in their very different ways, identifying and isolating the disease behind the upsetting display of contradictory and far-ranging symptoms of cultural breakdown...

...The fear that a network of obligations will hobble your aspirations is, however, itself a genuine threat...

...The life style of Packard’s people, the logical consequence of the pursuit of a kind of literal self-sufficiency, is indeed desolate...

...Both of these books, although written in totally different styles and from different perspectives, represent the beginning of the kind of reflection which may lead to a sea change in attitudes...

...The urge for independence is accountable only insofar as independence has been misinterpreted and the metaphor of striking out on one’s own has been taken literally as offering the essence of personal liberty...

...The fathers have been accused of being weak presences in the household and thus accountable for the unruly, alienated behavior of their children, but when you see that most of their waking hours are spent at work in some distant place, the exercise of a strong fatherhood is indeed a lot to ask...

...Packard’s people, the extreme victims, seem stretched so close to the threshold of intolerable pain that it seems almost certain they will begin to rebel against this way of life, dig their heels in, and say no to “opportunity” and “the big time...

...The family units have been criticized for being unneighborly to each other, but when you see that they are all constantly moving in and out of vacancies, it becomes understandable...

...Their all-American willingness to pack up and go whenever the opportunity calls is, in practice, about as assertive as a piece of metal drawn to a magnet...

...His analysis of the drive for what he calls independence in American life begins to explain why this pathological restlessness has been allowed, if not encouraged, to develop...

...Privacy is almost impossible, erratic behavior intolerable, and failures, weaknesses, and additional demands are more than any one person can take, because everyone is stretched to the limit, as on a tightly run ship...

...Dick and Jane on Wheels Although voluntary servitude describes more aptly than independence the state of the people in Packard’s book, their life style is a logical outcome of the drive for selfsuffiency...

...And, of course, there are no old people, except in separate sections...

...That kind of crushing of another person can take place under any circumstances, but some are more conducive to it than others...

...It is dominated by a floating depression-settling on an individual here, the architecture there-which the mass state of homelessness generates...

...The reason living in a permanent community of people, even in a backwater, seems preferable to the life of the wandering Americans is not that the price of wandering outweighs the worth of independence, but that it seems more likely one would be able to achieve real independenceself-possession and a strong “inner voice”-in the backwater than tumbleweeding through a suburban wasteland...

...As he draws it, the desire of young *A Family Matter...

...Packard looks at the pseudo-towns this restlessness creates, the tendency towards one-layer communities (in age and income), and somewhat loosely, the effects that constant mobility has on people...

...When you see that they have no continuity of relationship with adults other than their parents, nor with contemporaries, except in an impersonal, tribal sense, the generation gap becomes almost inevitable...

...The image is never set forth as something we could go back to, but it rustles continually through the pages of the book...

...Neither is very satisfactory in itself...

...But it doesn’t take much philosophical depth to see that geographically leaving home is a metaphor, not a formula, for growing up, nor is the idea that independence of spirit or self-possession is something people achieye inside themselves an astoundingly new one...

...The fear readily translates into resentment and a consequent tensing-up in your dealings with the people around you, thus straight-jacketing the expansion of your own spirit and fulfilling your worst expectations...

...But the external structure is so far alongpeople are already dispersed, housing has been built on the one-dimensional space capsule pattern, and people have set up their lives accordingly...

...The space-capsule family makes it almost inevitable because of the intensity of dependencies within it, however unfettered the unit might be from the outside...

...Resisting the Tumbleweed What can change is an attitude...

...The thesis of Lawrence Fuchs’ book, A Family Matter,* is that the cult of personal independence has led Americans to undervalue family-and community-bonds to the point that they are perceived as a threat rather than a blessing...

...For example, alcoholism and mental illness are exceptionally prevalent among the recently moved...

...There is no leeway for the spirit...

...Lawrence Fuchs...

...He quotes Emerson, “trust thyself . . . nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” and criticizes Thoreau’s celebration of nature as the only suitable companion for man because, turbulent as the elements might be, they never violate the The context of the breakdown of society and family powerfully supports Fuchs’ attack on these concepts, yet the ideas of Emerson, Thoreau, and company stir something deep inside, even when they are flanked in Fuchs’ pages by evidence and arguments against them...

...This book varies widely in quality...

...Because the progression is usually tied to age, each section tends to be roughly uniform: young couples with grammar-school children occupy the third-class section, and so on...

...Child care came to be considered a oneperson operation-the mother’s charge, since the father had to earn and there were no other family members around-and the stress in the voluminous 19th-century works on child care was independence of the child...

...Fuchs affects a kind of pan-intellectualism which only blurs the issue, sinks into the banal, and seems to flail hysterically about the germ of his idea, the misbegotten adulation of independence...

...Literally leaving home and striking out into new territory has been associated in America with growing up and living your own life because actual new territory lay out there to be settled, and the development of the country would have ground to a halt if everyone had stayed home on the East Coast...

...Fuchs bases his discussion on a paradigm of the early development of the American family...

...It’s a matter of attitude, of seeing the place where you happen to be and the different kinds of people in it-beyond the carefully selected circle of homogeneous friends-not as a handicap, but as something of value, a potentially liberating resource rather than an encumbrance...

...In contrast to this scenario, Fuchs indirectly sets a rather Hogarthian model of the oldtime family-buzzing with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, in-laws, hangers-on, and probably chickens, pigs, and goats-with women bearing the children in the big bed, wedding nights raucously intruded upon by the folks, death-watch scenes, and some hoary old male presiding over all...

...Fuchs gave Emerson and Thoreau the gate as threats to family and community...

...Life in a larger group of close relationships is far less likely to precipitate that syndrome because demands are diffused among many people...

...Vance Packard...

...That strikes me as a very low-grade interpretation of independence, just as moving about geographically as the spirit-or corporationmoves you seems a limited and rather adolescent idea of how to preserve the integrity of one’s “inner voice...

...When his father died, Thoreau assumed the responsibility of being head of the family...

...The Dark Sideof Two American Dreams a review by Suzannah Lessard The romance of lighting out for new regions still flourishes in the American heart...

...There has been a “degutsing” of family life, Fuchs says, and looking at Packard’s picture against older ways of life, his point comes home with extra force...

...Then, since the nuclear family not only accentuated the role division, but isolated women in their niches, women began to see themselves as imprisoned and to feel the lure of independenceconceived as freedom from their family role...

...The children have been criticized for being unreachable, in the exclusive, suspicious orbit of their own generation...

...During this process, according to Fuchs, the function of fatherhood declined rapidly, the threatening figure of Super-Mom emerged, and children who were raised to be “independent” became willful, unhappy adolescents, resentful of authority in any form...

...Because most of the men commute to their jobs, they are not seen in the landscape until evening...

...political participation or indeed any form of community cooperation degenerates...

...But their only social experience is their schoolwhere they are thrown in together, pulled out individually, and then thrown back into a different place...

...The task of reversing the pattern, however, seems almost insurmountable in practical terms...

...This is the picture that emerges from Packard’s book...

...You can’t raze the whole thing and start from scratch...

...Vance Packard’s A Nution of Strungers* is a massive compilation of material on the seamy side of the myth-the actuality behind the U. S. census figure that Americans move on the average of 14 times during their lives...

...You can’t blow a whistle and say everybody back to their families and communities, and even if you could, it would be pointless because the families and communities no longer exist as such...

...Thus divorce came to represent liberation for many women, and the stability of the family structure was further eroded...

...Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly mobility rates area for area...

...On the other hand, discomfort with Fuchs’ categorical dismissal of those old American ideas leads me to question his definition of independence-whether independence is really the price one must pay for bonds, roots, and community...

...Thoreau at Home Roots and bonds aren’t the enemy of independence...

...But the profession he practiced was a strange one that he evoked from his private character, and it paid him nothing but his self-respect...

...The prospect of unstringing the chord they strike conjures up a personally unacceptable unstringing of the spirit...

...Packard is at his best when he is simply describing Azusa or the way Welcome Wagons operate, and unrewarding when he ventures into commentary and analysis, but taken as a whole, the book hits directly on a fact of American life which we have all known exists but have never specifically identified as the source of a whole set of seemingly disparate social ills...

...The depression affects permanent residents as well as the temporary because, as Packard puts it, “Transients create fissures in a community...

...If his parents, his brothers, and sisters were disappointed, there is no record of regret or rebuke...

...television has become, for many people, the main substitute for continuous companionship...

...Packard rambles, goes for the cornball too often, and doesn’t succeed in capturing the significance of his astonishing material...

...welcoming people into a new place and helping them integrate and adjust has turned into a booming business since that function is no longer performed spontaneously by a community...

...divorce rates match *A Nation of Strangers...

...It happens, however, that both spent their lives in Concord, Massachusetts...

...Random House, $6.95...

...The concept of working with what you’ve got personally does not necessarily mean sticking it out in Concord no matter what, or living in the bosom of a huge family...

...The picture they form is one of an almost total breakdown of culture...

...If the part of one which responds to those ideas must be the price of retreating from Packard’s world, then it is a desperate, embittering choice...

...The disintegration of talent for living intimately with all sorts of other people is, to my mind, the cause for the breakdown Packard’s book illustrates...

...The book covers everything from towns in which the ordinary citizen is an up-and-coming executive who perches his family there for two years or so, to communities of defense workers (among the most transient), to retirement villages of old people far from home...