This Noble Land (27 page)

I believe that the genius of the United States is basically humanitarian. We are idealists who have always been willing to experiment with new social orders and new solutions to old problems. We are not a horde of people who will march backward in lockstep. We cannot long be satisfied with changes that are mean-spirited and destructive of our less favored citizens.

As I survey the long reach of American history I find us to be a people willing and even eager to help our neighbors. Our school system, which was once such a powerful force in uniting the nation, our willingness to build roads that would join our various districts, the brilliant manner in which we used capital to pay for new factories and workmen to staff them, and the proliferation in all parts of the country of local committees to support hospitals and libraries and symphony orchestras are proof that we are essentially a people with a cooperative spirit.

The current move to demonize liberals, calling into question their validity in American life and even their patriotism, is a dangerous leap in the wrong direction. It goes against the grain of American life and should be stopped. The successful nations are those who have mastered the art of alternating between a conservative government (to rectify errors of excess) and a liberal regime (to initiate bold steps forward). Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and France demonstrate how this can be done, and we ought to be the leader of that noble contingent which has provided the world with such good government and such rock-like stability. We are now in a period in which the programs of the 1929–94 liberals need retuning, and this will be done, but to turn our backs on our poor, to reverse the clock on justice for African Americans, and to ridicule and kill off our activities in the arts would be to commit grave error.

I believe that the basic strengths of our nation are such that we can survive as a world leader till about the year 2050. Our kinetic power, already in action, will carry us forward for half a century. I doubt we could make enough errors in that time to hinder our forward motion. So I am what you might describe as a near-term optimist.

But I am not so sure about the long term. I have spent my adult life studying the decline of once great powers whose self-indulgent
errors condemned them not only to decline but in many cases to extinction. Where is the grandeur of Assyria? Where are the glorious legions of ancient Rome? The far-flung greatness of the British Empire? The grandiose expansion of Mussolini’s African empire? Or the grandeur of sixteenth-century Spain and the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas?

The life cycle of empires and individual nations involves genesis, exploration, accomplishment, expansion, then loss of courage, contraction, lost mobility and decline. I have never thought that we were exempt from that rule of destiny; this great and worthy nation that has built a new and better life for millions of citizens will also fade slowly and end as every previous empire has.

I can foresee a time near the end of the next century when Japan, a nation with a homogeneous population and a superior educational system, thrives as a major power, unified and able to make strong decisions, while the United States, with our sectionalism and competing blocs, will have fragmented into many different units bound together uneasily, if at all. This will be the inevitable consequence if we make a host of wrong choices.

Our strategy must be to identify the rot, delay the decline and fortify the underpinning. We can postpone our vanishing from world leadership, but only if we adhere to the basics that made us great. I see many danger signals warning us that if we allow our land to break into two nations—one white, one black and tan—we are going to face catastrophe. If we callously sponsor a government that continues to shower largess on the already rich at the expense of the bottom third of the population, violence is bound to result. If we fail to educate our young people in the skills required to keep our system functioning, we condemn ourselves to a second-class position in the family of nations.

We are not exempt from the universal law of obsolescence, but we have one impressive fact to sustain us: of all the forms of government operating on this earth today, ours is the longest-lived. We are the outstanding success. Going back to 1789, when our democracy was launched, all other forms of government existing at that time and competing with us have experienced revolutions, wild changes, slow decline and a discarding of the form of government they had in that year. Even stable Britain was forced to convert its once powerful monarch into a mere titular head and to change its House of Lords, which had been a coequal partner of the House of Commons, to a ceremonial body with little authority.

We are the survivor whose basic roots were sound to begin with and were carefully nurtured and improved as two centuries passed. Now, with dedication to the principles that made us great, we can at least borrow time. Clear sailing—albeit through increasingly roiled waters—till 2050, then the beginning of twilight. But in the next half century we can light new candles of excellence, protect the ones we already have and gain an extension. I wish I could witness the next years of decision; they should be riveting as we face one crucial choice after another. I hope our genius for doing the right thing will guide us.

For the statistical research in this manuscript I am indebted to three young assistants who worked closely under my supervision. They are all from the University of Texas at Austin and are John Kings, my longtime assistant; Debbie Brothers, my equally longtime secretary; and Susan Dillon, who volunteered to join me as a research and computer expert. Their contributions occur on many pages in this book.

J
AMES
A. M
ICHENER
, one of the world’s most popular writers, was the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning
Tales of the South Pacific
, the best-selling novels
Hawaii
,
Texas
,
Chesapeake
,
The Covenant
, and
Alaska
, and the memoir
The World Is My Home
. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.

Read on for an excerpt from James A. Michener’s

POLAND

I
n a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season
of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Washington, Peking and especially Moscow.

This village of Bukowo, 763 souls, stood at the spot where the great river Vistula turns to the north in its stately passage from its birthplace in the Carpathian Mountains at the south to its destiny in the Baltic Sea at the north. In the little settlement there was a stone castle erected in
A.D
. 914 as a guard against marauders from the east, but this had been destroyed in the early years when those marauders arrived in stupefying force. Each subsequent owner of the village had planned at one time or other either to tear down the ruins or rebuild them, but none had done so because the old castle exercised a spell on all who saw it, and there was a legend among the villagers that so long as their ruined tower stood, they would stand. There must have been some truth to this because there had often been great clamor in Bukowo, but like its doomed tower, it still stood.

Nearly thirty-six million Poles, of whom eighteen million were of voting age, were controlled by the Communist party of only three million members. This minority had made a symbolic concession right at the start of the present trouble. They agreed to hold the discussions over farm policy in the very village from which the principal protester came, and this was interpreted by all as a sincere gesture of good will, but as Janko Buk, the leader they were trying to placate, said: ‘With the steel strikers giving them so much trouble in Gdansk, they can’t afford to have us on their backs, too.’

The Communists had chosen this village for several additional reasons. It lay in the heart of a large agricultural district and was thus representative. It was also well removed from any big city whose practiced agitators might try to influence or even disrupt proceedings. And perhaps most important, it was near the recently renovated Bukowski palace, with its seventy rooms available for meetings of whatever size might be required.

The three names—Buk for the peasant leader of the troubles, Bukowo for his village, and Bukowski for the family which had once owned the palace—obviously stemmed from the same root, the strong word
buk
signifying
beech tree
, and this was appropriate because from time past remembering, the vast area east of the river had contained a large forest whose principal trees had been oaks, pines, ash, maples and especially beech, those tall, heavy trees with excellent trunks. Through the centuries foresters had selectively cut these trees, sometimes floating the great trunks all the way to the Baltic for shipment to Hamburg and Antwerp, but all the woodsmen had carefully tended a particularly noble stand of beech that defined the eastern edge of the village. Like the castle which they resembled, the beeches of Bukowo possessed a special grace.

The great forest of which they formed such a major part had not borne a name until
A.D
. 888, when the extremely primitive people who lived between it and the river were frightened by a semi-madman who lived amongst them. He claimed that one evening while returning home with a bundle of faggots collected from under the beech trees, he had been accosted by the devil, who wore about his neck long chains which clinked and clanged, and he convinced them, especially the children, that if they listened closely when the devil was afoot, they could hear the rattling chains.

The dense woods was named the Forest of Szczek in that long-ago year, and everyone agreed that the name was well chosen, for clinking, clanging sounds did often come from this forest, and since in Polish the letter
e
—if printed with an accent,
e
carries an
n
sound, the word was pronounced
shtchenk
, which resembles the sound that a chain clinking would make.

The villagers protected the ruins of their good-luck castle and tended the beech trees they loved, but they were proudest of their palace. It had been assembled in rambling style over many centuries by the poor Bukowskis, who had been little better than peasants themselves although acknowledged as petty nobles, and in grand style by the Bukowskis of 1896, who had stumbled upon a fortune.

The palace stood on a slight rise overlooking the castle ruins and the Vistula beyond and was a place of real magnificence, the equal of the lesser French châteaux along the Loire. Shaped like a two-story capital U, the open part with its two protruding wings facing west, its long major base faced east, overlooking the village and the forest beyond. It had been heavily damaged in the closing days of World War II during the German defeat and the Russian victory, but its many rooms had been rebuilt in the 1950s and now functioned as a museum, a rest home for Communist party VIPs and a meeting place for major convocations. A good chauffeur could drive from Warsaw in something under four hours and from Krakow in less than three, so that when government officials selected Bukowo as the site for this important conference they knew what they were doing. Anyone who had visited the Bukowski palace once wanted to do so again.