Eden as Eldorado, part three

My naval education as a radar technician (1944-46) was mainly spent in the South (Gulfport,MS;Corpus Christi, TX;Pensacola,FL) where my drifting to the back of the bus (by force of habit) triggered disturbances all out of proportion to the ephemeral events. Back at the University of Detroit, I joined the Catholic Interracial Council--to talk out with high school students their fears about living in mixing neighborhoods.

About the same time, a crisis at our summer cottage--our neighbors the Reilly's down the beach decided to open their rental cottages to "anybody", meaning allowing Niggers from Detroit to spoil our clean beaches. I'll never forget the day when my mother, as sweet and unhateful a heart that ever beat tried to conclude a dinner discussion with,"Do you want your daughter (then 13) down on the beach with "them"? My flip response was, "If she runs into a Harry Belafonte type, YES". But grave social disorders are not resolved with flip responses.

When I moved to the Philadelphia area, my wife complained about the boredom of living down in Levittown while I was living it up on a fellowship at Penn. So we moved to Greenbelt Knoll, a visionary scheme of Morris Milgrim who devised countless ways of integrating housing from the 1950's until his death in 1995. It was heady. One hundred foot oak trees--by a zoning variance we nineteen "integrators" were living in a rolling slice of Pennypack Park.

Our neighbors included the Reverend Leon Sullivan and Robert N.C.Nix (Dem,PA), the latter the first black congressman from Philadelphia. He worked very hard as chairman of the House Postoffice Committee to get blacks jobs at the Main Post Office. My second son works nights now at that post office, which he calls the Plantation because the preponderance of blacks have made it tough on the white "minority" who now work there.

But Greenbelt Knoll was no test of tolerance: these professional people were a joy to mingle with--with a very few aberrant exceptions! I babble on about my peripheral involvements in America's greatest problems to make my point: no amount of individual brilliance or achievement will make a viable community. And those idealists who insist on being quietly relevant are largely unknown to the media-crazed American public--W.E.B.DuBois, Dorothy Day, Morris Dees, Millard Fuller. Fuller's HABITAT FOR HUMANITY is a paradigm of an America finally achieving community.

All over our country (and increasingly, all over the world), volunteers contribute their free time and ideals to build sweat equity housing for the underserved. Dees and Fuller were hotshot mail order honchos at the University of Alabama, racking up sizeable nest eggs from their after class business--Dees used his to found the Southern Poverty Law Center and Fuller to start HABITAT.

Those two men are my kind of American Dreamers: using wealth to bring all kinds of Americans together in viable communities. They are the people our media ought to broadcast--their visions, their opportunities to join in with them. Those kinds of people will make us great. Not media celebs, offering vicarious fantasy lives instead of freely shared ones.

But they are not why I want us to awaken from the (false) American Dream. It was when I discovered in David Madden's collection of essays on "The Thirties" that the term was coined during the Depression. In effect, it was a kind of psychological whistling in the dark, just as I could never forget when I was devising the Penn course on "The Mass Society" in 1958 how Fairfax Cone reacted to the recession that year. He reminded his readers in "Advertising Age" that America was still the All-Time Hit on Humanity's Hit Parade.

What a cheap comedown from our Puritan ancestors' absurd belief that God had saved the New World so that He could make a Covenant with Them. Secularized, this hubris became Manifest Destiny which morphed into the American Dream. The trouble with this American Exceptionalism is that it prevents us from learning from other cultures and traditions. McDonaldizing makes us ineducable, a threat to international harmony and development. That is what I will try to illustrate in the essays which follow.