The American Century: Literature since 1945 523to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation
has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and
around the world.”
President John F. Kennedy spoke in these terms at his Inaugural in January 1961.
He had won the election by only the narrowest of margins. But, once elected, he
brought with him to office the expectation of great change, an optimism and confi-
dence about the character of the United States and its role in the world that many
Americans were eager to share. His words were ambiguous, to say the least. Did they
anticipate the elimination of poverty and inequality or a renewed aggressiveness in
foreign policy – or perhaps both? Despite this, or maybe even because of it, they
struck a responsive chord in the heart of the nation. “We stand today on the edge of
a new frontier,” Kennedy declared, “a frontier of unknown opportunities and
perils.... I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier.” The appeal
to the apparently timeless myth of the West, pioneering and conquest, was echoed in
the words of Robert Frost at the Inaugural. Frost had been invited to the ceremony
as America’s unofficial poet laureate, and as an emblem of Kennedy’s belief that he
could, among many other things, preside over a revitalization of the nation’s cultural
life. Eighty-six years old now, he recited from memory his poem “The Gift Outright”:
“This land was ours before we were the land’s, / ” the poem begins. “She was our land
more than a hundred years / Before we were her people.” Going on to “the land
vaguely realizing westward, / But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,” the poem, just
like the speech, captures a dominant feeling of the time. It captures the confidence,
the ambition, the sense of potential, and the arrogance of a “new generation of
Americans,” and weds all this to the ideology of a long-vanished frontier.
The America to which both poet and president spoke was a constellation of many
new attitudes and forces: a nation of 180 million people, a growing number of whom
were white suburbanites living in quiet comfort on the edge of the older, urban
areas, buying their goods in out-of-town shopping malls, and working in white-
collar service-sector industries. Nine out ten families, by this time, owned a television,
and six out of ten of them a car. The gross national product seemed to move
inexorably upward, from 285 billion dollars in 1950 to 503 billion in 1960, and so
too did the population index: during the 1950s the population had risen by 18.5
percent. Most of this increase was due to the rapid rise in the birth rate and a
prolonged life-expectancy, rather than to immigration; and the result was that nearly
half the population was either under 18 or over 65, too young or too old to participate
in the economic life of the nation. To those excluded by youth or age from full
participation in the nation’s growing wealth could be added those excluded by race
or situation: fruitpickers in California, say, black sharecroppers in the South, and the
different ethnic groups comprising the urban poor. While the income of middle-
class Americans of working age continued to improve, that of the bottom 20 percent
showed hardly any advance at all. There was conspicuous abundance, but there was
equally conspicuous poverty: the rhetoric of the president possibly acknowledged
this, but it tended to be forgotten amid the general euphoria, the sense of irresistible
expansion and movement forwards toward a “New Frontier.” And it was only in theGGray_c05.indd 523ray_c 05 .indd 523 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM