U.S. IS RETREATING FROM DOMESTIC PROBLEMS

The CHAIRMAN. Another article that has been called to my attention is by a former mayor of Minneapolis. Mr. Arthur Naftalin, in an article entitled "Our Urban Plight," had this to say in the April issue of Nation's Cities:

It is extremely important. I believe, that we come promptly to appreciate that, for all of the debate and dialogue and for all of the viewing-with-alarm by our mass media, as a Nation we are retreating from our problems rather than mounting an attack upon them. The President and Congress acknowledge the need for new approaches and enlarged efforts. But all that is proposed are programs that will do no more than nibble at the margins of the problems. They are offered not to meet the urgent and immediate present but for the future when other needs-the Vietnam war, a larger defense establishment, a continuing space effort and tax reduction for the affluent middle and upper classes-have been provided for. That is not a very encouraging statement either. Do you agree with that?

Mr. CAVANAGH. I agree. I have great respect for Mayor Naftalin. He, by the way, is also now a professor at the University of Minnesota. I guess that is where old mayors retreat to-universities. [Laughter.] (The article referred to follows.)

OUR URBAN PLIGHT: A CRISIS IN KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

BY ARTHUR NAFTALIN

By now everyone is an expert on the urpan crisis. The subject is so broad and wide and deep, affecting us in so many different ways, it has come to be all things to all men. It involves concerns that are at once governmental, economic, social, psychological, technological, moral, and philosophical; and it covers all aspects of community life and individual behavior-human relations, law enforcement, housing, sanitation, health services, education, income distribution-name it and you name a part of the urban crisis.

I must, therefore, make clear at the start that I view the urban crisis in a very broad context that reaches far beyond the problems of the ghetto. It involves the full sweep of our physical environment, growing congestion and pollution, the waste of our natural resources, especially our land, the critical lack of adequate housing, the failure to preserve open space, the growing problems of water supply, drainage and waste disposal, and the baffling explosion of technology that has introduced speed and movement and change at a pace that confuses and bewilders almost everyone.

On the social side the crisis is not only a matter of poverty, although this is certainly its single most critical element. It involves a changing value structure that is fundamentally altering the nature of family life and the overall pattern of human relationships. It also involves an alarming increase in the use of alcohol and drugs and mounting tensions that derive from growing insecurity and our inability to control or discharge hostility. And it involves a general weakening of our major institutions of social control, especially the family and education. Suddenly everything seems to have gone wrong. Police departments can no longer maintain law and order; our welfare system seemingly contributes to rather than checks social disorganization; the numbers of those suffering deprivations-even to the point of starvation-increases despite our unprecedented affluence; millions of our citizens remain victims of discrimination but we seem unable to reverse this historic pattern; we luxuriate in material goods and yet fail to support our educational system.

AS A NATION WE ARE RETREATING FROM OUR PROBLEMS RATHER THAN MOUNTING AN ATTACK UPON THEM

Why should we be in such difficulty? What happened to plunge this great nation into such deep trouble? Why do our efforts to cope with the urban crisis seem so faltering and ineffectual?

There are no simple answers. Our problems emerge out of deep-seated forces that assault all of our institutions and will not be contained until we have instituted reforms that are related to the new reality created by these forces.

The first of these forces is modern technology. It has relentlessly enlarged the scope and scale of economic organization and it has imposed an increasing need for human specialization and community interdependence. Yet, for all that has been written about the effect of technology on society, we are still not able, as a nation, to perceive how it has made our central institutions—especially government and education-increasingly irrelevant and unresponsive.

Our exploding technology produces increasingly a society in which man's worth turns out the special talents he brings to the marketplace. As specialization intensifies and as machines supplant human labor, man develops capabilities that can find an outlet only in the urban center. This is what is behind the movement from farms to cities all over the world and this is why training and education have become so indispensable for both individual and community survival.

But this is only one dimension of the change wrought by modern technology. It has also extended the span of life; suddenly we have millions of senior citizens living at or near the poverty level. And the drugs that have added years of life have also created new problems by altering the range and quality of human experience and consciousness, introducing new and deeply unsettling patterns of behavior and threatening established moral codes.

In another direction our technology urges us on to an ever more feverish exploitation of our environment. New inventions, such as insecticides and nuclear energy, invade industry and agriculture with a momentum that seems irresistible. And before we can assess what is happening we have such problems of air and water pollution and land contamination that some scientists fear we may be destroying the world's ecological balance.

Meantime, in our hunger to enjoy the new opportunities opened by technology and science, we recklessly squander our land and we permit our settlements to sprawl in all directions, creating still new urban problems.

The picture, of course, familiar to you. I dwell on it because, in my work as mayor I was continuously appalled by our inability to sustain an awareness of the devastation and imbalances that are coming to dominate our social and physical environment. The uses of technology and science cry out for some form of enlightened control that will preserve our natural and human resources, but the cry remains essentially unheeded, which brings me to the second underlying force that, in my view, accounts for our inability to cope with our present illsthe rigidity, inadequacy, and unresponsiveness of our governmental structure.

It is extremely important, I believe, that we come promply to appreciate that, for all of the debate and dialogue and for all of the viewing-with-alarm by our mass media, as a nation we are retreating from our problems rather than mounting an attack upon them. The President and Congress acknowledge the need for new approaches and enlarged efforts. But all that is proposed are programs that will do no more than nibble at the margins of the problems. They are offered not to meet the urgent and immediate present but for the future when other needs-the Vietnam War, a larger defense establishment, a continuing space effort, and tax reduction for the affluent middle and upper classes-have been provided for. There is today an absence in our national leadership of a sense of urgency and an awareness of the need for redirecting the use of our enormous national resources and establishing national priorities that are aimed at preserving our strength as a nation.

And, if the national picture is discouraging, it is even more bleak at the state level. For many years now we have been bombarded by the call for a greater involvement of state governments in meeting our problems, the notion being that we can begin to reduce the size of the national bureaucracy by shifting responsibility to the states.

This call is now being heeded under the name of the New Federalism, and it is, in my view, a snare. The plain and simple and unchallengeable fact is that our state governments are in default as regards their responsibilities to the urban centers and there is no evidence to suggest that this historic pattern of indifference will be reversed.

To round out the dismal picture, while the national government retreats and the state governments remain in default, the local governments are in a state of paralysis. Municipalities, counties, and school districts suffer in a tangled web of overlapping jurisdictions, competing fiercely for the tax dollar that comes for the most part from overburdened property in the form of the most regressive tax we know.

Authority is fragmented among a maze of government units; leadership is in flight to the suburbs, the municipalities are unable to reach the resources of the area; the inner city dweller and the suburbanite find their interests increasingly

polarized; and in the end, all of the critical problems appear no longer susceptible to local management or control.

I mean no partisan criticism in these observations concerning the unresponsive character of our government. Our failure is as much the responsibility of Democrats as of Republicans. It reflects a lack of popular support for measures that would shape a course of national action designed to take into realistic account the nature of modern technology, both its opportunities and its devastations. It is this lack of popular support for institutional change that brings me to the third force that underlies our present predicament. This is the hold on our public consciousness of historic premises and biases that were tolerable-perhaps even to a degree valuable--in a nation with a primitive economic and social order in which men lived largely in isolation from each other.

These biases derived largely from our emphasis on individualism, which conditioned us to accept competition as a way of life and to cherish the jungle's code of the survival of the fit as our creed. Thus, we rejected government as a positive and sanguine force; the very term planning has been anathema until very recently. Throughout our history we have demanded that the community take no action that would impede the individual from exploiting his surroundings. We saw government action as destructive, regarding any action aimed at controlling individual excesses as containing the seeds of tyranny.

As a result, our institutions of government were from the start never designed to regulate or to control or to govern. They were designed to blend and moderate clashing interests and not to exceed the minimal purpose of maintaining domestic tranquility and preventing external invasion.

Meantime, a related bias took hold. This was the nation's distrust of the urban center. From the beginning the American people have viewed the city as the source of all that is unwholesome in American life—sin, corruption, squalor, and lack of conformity. The countryside was perceived as pristine and wholesome, gentle and creative, where men lived at peace with a nature that carried Providence's special blessing.

Thus, through the years we have been anti-government and anti-city. We gave over control of the government to rural forces and even today, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's one-man, one-vote edict, control of Congress and of state legislatures eludes the city; we are governed by an alliance of rural and suburban legislators who cannot understand why our cherished institutions and our historic values should be under such fierce fear of the inner city and in their unwillingness to provide the massive resources needed to attend to urban problems.

Add to these biases our deep-seated yearnings to preserve our separate ethnic, religious, racial, and social groupings plus our historic refusal to shape a society with a single standard of treatment and opportunity. Despite our lofty pretensions, we have been from the start a racist nation (can slavery have any other explanation?), and our many diverse groups have been in a state of continuous warfare. Discrimination, deprivation, and division have been constant conditions in the American scene, constituting a major factor in the atmosphere of violence that has been characteristic of the nation.

These, then, are among the forces that have shaped the urban problem and that define the context within which the efforts of social scientists must, I believe, necessarily proceed if action-oriented research and experimentation are to have operational significance.

Within this context I identify a series of critical needs, each of which demands a vast enlargement of valid social theory and scientific knowledge.

The first of these is the basic restructuring of government, especially at the local level.

WE NEED A BASIC RESTRUCTURING OF GOVERNMENT, PARTICULARLY AT THE LOCAL LEVEL Our formal public efforts to meet the urban crisis (anti-poverty, urban renewal, public housing, aid to education, pollution control, planning assistance, civil rights legislation, and perhaps 150 or more federal grant programs) have been haphazard, under-financed, duplicating, and fragmented. The city has remained essentially powerless in the face of the mounting problems, lacking authority to develop cohesive and realistic programs and unable to reach the needed

resources.

A restructuring of government is essential if new innovative efforts are to have a reasonable chance to survive and succeed. Urban problems are areawide problems, and a society that is so largely the product of social and economic organization based on an increasingly more sophisticated technology cannot

deal with its problems except as it fashions a governmental organization that responds to the complexity of the larger society and can effectively innovate programs that are consonant with the prevailing scale of community activity. The restructuring of government may appear to be the particular concern of specialists in government and administration and of only secondary interest to psychologists and other social scientists. This view, I believe, is too limited, because the lack of effective structure is pervasively impeding all innovative efforts whether it be the fashioning of a decentralized store-front health center or little city hall, a training program for police officers, a remedial educational effort for delinquent or disadvantaged children, creation of an educational park, establishment of an area wide transportation system, or industrial development that creates job opportunities for the presently dispossessed.

All require the resources of an area much larger than the inner city and none can succeed except as they are made part of a more cohesive and more comprehensive approach to a network of interrelated services and needs.

Government is the primary mechanism for the control of negative influences and the marshaling and unleashing of positive forces, and, if it is to fill its proper role in dealing with our urban problems, it must come to have a reasonable relationship to the nature of our industrial society. We must come to see that the economy of our nation is national; that it is only the national government that can direct the flow of income in a fashion that will alleviate the most troublesome of our inequities and disparties and that it is only the national government that can reach the national wealth.

It means, also, that we must come to see that our interrelated social and economic problems will be susceptible to control only through national programs based on national objectives enjoying national financing.

Once we have begun to develop viable local governments and once we have begun to establish realistic national programs based on meaningful commitments, we will be ready for further institutional rearrangements—such as devolving administrative responsibility on a regional basis, a more sensible involvement of state governments, and a vast enlargement of direct citizen participation.

The second critical need that should have the greatly enlarged attention of researchers is a vast qualitative improvement in the leadership and manpower that serves the public sector.

One reason for the enormous success of the private sector of our economy has been the constant infusion of individuals of leadership capacity and imaginative force. The urban crisis today demands that we attract and retain a greatly enlarged number of such leaders for the public sector and that we devise the educational and training devices that will prepare them for innovative roles in government.

This is an extraordinarily difficult objective because it involves not only adequate monetary reward and assurances of stable career opportunities but also the development of a general climate that regards public effort as meaningful and productive.

Effective structure and quality leadership are still not sufficient ingredients; they must be joined by a third critical factor, namely a vast increase in knowledge and a profound improvement in our systems of communicating information. WE MUST HAVE NEW AND MORE USEFUL KNOWLEDGE CONCERNING THE NATURE OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Again and again we are told that a project has failed for lack of communication. Again and again we see that when information has been effectively organized even the most benighted among us respond constructively. The urban crisis is a crisis in knowledge and wisdom. One need not be of cynical temperament to entertain doubts concerning our capacity to survive, because the scope and complexity of our problems often make them seem beyond control and our efforts discouragingly ineffectual. Yet, man's successes in mastering his environment remain formidable and impressive. The moonshots are reassuring; it demonstrated what can be done when the commitment to achieve large and complex objectives is firmly made and the support unstintingly provided.

We need the same generous and spirited massing of information systems on our even more complicated and deeply threatening urban problems, and this massing requires new theoretical breakthroughs in our understanding of human behavior and in the interaction of technology and society-breakthroughs that only can come with the hard application of all of our intellectual resources.

Specifically, we must have new and more readily useful knowledge concerning the nature of social movements, concerning how to control and channel the discharge of hostility, how to influence belief structures so that prevailing attitudes are more consistent with the needs of the objective world and at the same time not do violence to the integrity and dignity of the individual, how to make education more vital and more relevant, how to release through planning those aesthetic elements that will enhance the quality of life, and how to enhance the involvement and sense of personal worth for everyone in an increasingly impersonal society.

For all this we must have money and this is the forth critical need—a massive increase in the resources available to the public sector.

If modern technology has taught us anything it must be that we are irreversibly, irretrievably interdependent; that more and more we will do together what we once did as individuals; that the economic victims of the system are the community's responsibilities; that the survival of our values demands an enormous program of catching-up so that the dispossessed will be incorporated into the system before they destroy it; that education is the indispensable condition for establishing human worth; and that no cost is too great to prevent us from making certain that every individual has that opportunity.

This brings me to the fifth and last need-the unlearning of old destructive attitudes and the inculcation of new outlooks that are consonant with the urban condition, because we shall meet none of the critical needs I have mentioned so long as there is no basic change in our pervailing national attitudes.

As a people we cling to old myths that blind us to reality. Even though, with only 8 per cent of the world's population, we have 40 per cent of the world's wealth, we stubbornly regard ourselves as impoverished. We spend only 27 per cent of our gross national income for public services and public goods, while other nations spend vastly more (Sweden, for example, 43 per cent). We are, in fact, a nation of unprecedented wealth; we can afford anything we are bold enough to want.

We cling to the notion that our urban ills can be cured by private action and that only those with a capacity to survive on his own initiative are entitled to public respect or community report for endeavors-such as education-that will help them to advance.

And we remain bedevilled by emotions and fears of ethnic and racial differences; thus we drift ever more ominously towards the divided society reported by the Kerner Commission.

These are not optimistic judgments and my description of urban needs is distressingly hortatory. Yet, they are my honest views and they describe a framework for action that for me is a meaningful one because I see little promise of success if we fail in this critical period to begin a fundamental transformation of our society.

I do not know whether science can save us from ourselves and I do not know what we can properly demand and expect from those who are engaged in the pursuit of new approaches to our problems. I can only say, as one who has viewed them from the firing line, where unreason and irrational seem to be on the rise, that I see man's hope for conquering his future ever more dependent upon his capacity and willingness to face reality with all of his accumulated knowledge and to make the adjustments that his reason and wisdom show him to be essential for survival.

SITUATION AT U.S. UNIVERSITIES

The CHAIRMAN. Are you sure that the university is any safer than city hall?

Mr. CAVANAGH. No, I don't think it is the sanctuary it once was. The CHAIRMAN. No, it is becoming a very exposed sanctuary. Mr. Kingman Brewster is in a very difficult spot.

Mr. CAVANAGH. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. I am very sympathetic with his situation. This is to me a very distressing development and, as a matter of fact, I think it is on all fours with the cities. I think that these people have a feel