This Noble Land Read Online Free Page A

now review the column I begin to wonder if my favorable evaluation of America was skewed by the intense indoctrination I received from my first day in Sunday school and, more important, my first morning in public school. For the first six or seven years of my education I lapped up patriotism until I acquired a faith in my country that has never since diminished. It continues to dictate my behavior at unexpected times and provides me with an almost automatic set of responses when public values are being challenged. I am not wise enough to determine whether that early and incessant indoctrination made me too uncritical.
    But a study of the third column proves that today I am able to see American society with a more critical eye. I stand by every evaluation in that column and might make some of the judgments even harsher.
    What the plethora of negative evaluations in the summary suggests is that our society is in danger, and, in some cases like the failure of large parts of our educational system, even in peril. The magnitude of these fracture points and what can be done to anticipate and escape them will be the focus of the remaining chapters in this essay.

I have been privileged to know American families at almost every level of income, from the Texas oil billionaires, about whom I have written, to the numerous garden-variety rich families with not much over a million. A large proportion of the families with which I have worked fall into the huge middle class with salaries around $75,000, and because I work with students I know scores who live on less than $10,000 a year. In the years prior to World War II the highest salary I ever had was $4,800 a year, so that a salary of $75,000 was far beyond the limits of my imagination, but of course $4,800 in the thirties was worth many times more than it is worth today. I have also been keenly interested in the street people so common in our cities who have minimal income and often no place to call home. They are outcasts, and I have never understood how they could have reached that appalling level. I cannot comprehend how a healthy man in his forties can have wasted his life and ended in the gutter, but even more incomprehensible is how a mother with two children could land beside him.
    From a study of people with various levels of income I have come to realize just how important a living wage is. Fundamental to every problem I discuss in this book is not only our nation’s wealth but how it is distributed among the citizens.
    So that we can have figures to refer to in our discussion, I present two different charts: the first listing outstanding family accumulationsof wealth sometimes dating back to the last century; the second showing yearly incomes of a random selection of people living today.
    For
Forbes
magazine in 1994, $350 million marked the cutoff point between the very wealthy on the one hand and the merely elite who are categorized as ‘the comfortable millionaires.’ The ‘moderately wealthy’ trail behind in their $100 million ghettos.
    In April 1995
The New York Times
reported that Federal Reserve figures from 1989, which the paper said were the most recent numbers available, revealed that ‘the wealthiest 1% of American households—with net worth of at least $2.3 million each—[owned] nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth.… Farther down the scale, the top 20% of Americans—households worth $180,000 or more—[possess] more than 80% of the country’s wealth.’ A year later, in April 1996,
The Wall Street Journal
reported that an analysis by the New York compensation consultants Pearl Meyer & Partners Inc. done for the newspaper showed that ‘the heads of about 30 major companies received compensation that was 212 times higher than the pay of the average American employee.’
    Here is a list of some of the country’s wealthiest families:
    Family Fortunes Accumulated in the Past but Still Intact (a sampling)

    The implications of the concentration of wealth