What America Thought About Itself in 1976

Americans were ready to have fun during the American Bicentennial in 1976. Surprised? You might think it was a country still gloomily obsessed with the Vietnam War and Watergate. Maybe it still kind of was. But Americans also thought better days were ahead. A new Vox piece (“The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse?”) reports on the national mood on July 4 of that year: [When] pollsters asked people how they felt about the country’s future that year, the mood was, improbably, sunny. A Roper survey found more Americans were optimistic than pessimistic about the future by a nearly three to one ratio. More than three-quarters told Gallup the nation had already achieved at least a fair amount of its founding ideals. Somehow, a nation that was in the middle of a genuinely miserable decade looked in the mirror and liked what it saw. A perhaps less empirically rigorous—but still informative way, I think—gauge the state of the American Spirit in 1976 can be found inThe Tricentennial Report: Letters to America, a 1977 booklet sponsored by Atlantic Richfield, a Los Angeles-based oil and gas producer. A year earlier, the Bicentennial’s arrival had prompted the company to run advertisements in newspapers and magazines across America inviting readers to write letters to their future fellow Americans in the far-off 2076. Those ads generated some 6,000 responses with a selection included in the 80-page report. Many respondents chose to dabble in amateur futurism and describe the possible shape of things to come. This from a Cambridge, Mass., resident: New towns will have sprung up in the 1980s as a result of increasing middle-class flight from the decaying cities. At first, inhabitants of the new towns will commute, but rising food prices and deteriorating commuter service will drive them to become farmers and artisans living in self-sufficient communities. Before the obsolescence of the automobile, armed gangs from the cities will often raid the new towns, which would respond to the threat by building walls and fortifications. As the car disappears and the threat from the cities lessens, rivalries and wars with nearby towns will erupt, and the walls will stay. The face of 21st-century America, then, will resemble that of medieval Europe. … On a lighter note, since most of the population will barely be subsisting on the results of their agriculture, almost everyone will be thin. The publication contains lots of letters like that, speculative fiction about overpopulation, environmental degradation, resource shortages, and American collapse. But the dystopianism is hardly surprising. The American public of 1976 had just suffered through a long, nasty recession, as well as an inflation surge and oil shock, with many economists suggesting that future resource constraints wouldn’t be limited to petroleum. The Tricentennial Report also included 36,000 responses to a questionnaire that also appeared in newspapers and magazines. A fair reading of the responses is that there was plenty of aspiration along with plenty of concern. As far as the former goes, there was strong or very strong disagreement with “I hope there will be a decreased emphasis on technological solutions to our problems” and “I would like to keep the nation’s population down through the use of mandatory birth control,” as well as “Government regulations should limit the structure, size and profits of all major corporations.” At the same time, majorities agreed with “I would like communications to be so rapid and thorough that people can participate directly in government decisions” and “In the future, in general, I think life will be better than today.” But that optimistic vibe coexisted with this: “I believe energy problems will continue at least until the year 2000,” again, a view reflected in a large number of the letters. By the way, I don’t know if the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign for 1980 ever saw The Tricentennial Report, but there was a lot in it to give center-right encouragement such as strong majorities agreeing with “I want less government at every level” and disagreeing with “I want stronger Federal government.”