AMERICAN SOCIETYContaining less than 5 percent of the world’s
population, the United States is a polyglot nation
of nations that now accepts a greater and more
diverse inflow of legal immigrants than any other
country—an average of about one million a year
from 1990 to 1995. It is often called a young
nation, but elements of its culture are continuous
with the ancient cultures of Europe, Asia, and
Africa, and its political system is one of the most
long-enduring constitutional democracies. Many
writers have alleged that its culture is standard-
ized, but it continues to show great diversity of
regions, ethnic groupings, religious orientations,
rural-urban contrasts, age groupings, political views,
and general lifestyles. It is a society in which many
people seem convinced that it is undergoing rapid
social change, while they hold firmly to many
values and social structures inherited from the
past. Like all other large-scale societies, in short,
it is filled with ambiguities, paradoxes, and
contradictions.
This society emerged as a product of the great
period of European expansion. From 1790 to
1990, the U.S. land area expanded from fewer
than 900,000 square miles to well over three mil-
lion; its populations from fewer than four million
to about 265 million. The United States has never
been a static social system in fixed equilibrium
with its environment. Peopled primarily by histo-
ry’s greatest voluntary intercontinental migration,
it has always been a country on the move. The vast
growth of metropolitan areas is the most obvious
sign of the transformation of a rural-agricultural
society into an urban-industrial society. In 1880,
the nation had four million farms; in 1992 it had
1.9 million. From 1949 to 1979 the index of output
per hour of labor went from about twenty to about
- The most massive change in the occupational
structure, correspondingly, has been the sharply
decreasing proportion of workers in agriculture—
now less than 1 percent of the labor force.
The technological transformations that have
accompanied these trends are familiar. The total
horsepower of all prime movers in 1940 was 2.8
billion; in 1963 it was 13.4 billion; by 1978 it was
over 25 billion. Productive capacities and trans-
portation and communication facilities show simi-
lar long-term increases. For example, from 1947 to
1995, the annual per capita energy consumption
in the United States went from 230 to 345 million
BTUs—an increase of about 50 percent. The Ameri-
can people are dependent to an unprecedented
degree on the automobile and the airplane. (As of
the late 1980s, the average number of persons per
passenger car was 1.8; by 1995, there were 201
million motor vehicles in a population of some 263
million—1.6 persons per vehicle.) Mass transit is
only weakly developed. During the single decade
of the 1960s there was a 50 percent increase in the
number of motor vehicles, and in many cities such
vehicles account for 75 percent of the outdoor
noise and 80 percent of the air pollution. With
about 200 million motor vehicles in 1998, it is even
possible to imagine an ultimate traffic jam—total
immobilization from coast to coast.All indicators of what we may call ‘‘heat and
light’’ variables have increased greatly: energy con-
sumption, pieces of mail handled by the U.S.
Postal Service (from 106 billion in 1980 to 183
billion in 1996), televisions (2.3 sets per household
in 1995), telephones (93.9 percent of households
had one in 1995), radios, electronic mail (29 mil-
lion persons using the Internet), cellular phones,
and fax. A vast flood of messages, images, and
information criss-crosses the continent.In American households, the average number
of hours that the television was on increased from
5.6 in 1963 to 6.8 in 1976, and continues to slowly
increase. The effects of television viewing are com-
plex, although there is general agreement among
researchers that mass exposure is selective, does
focus attention on some matters rather than oth-
ers (raising public awareness), influence attitudes
on specific issues—especially those on which in-
formation is scanty—and probably has cumulative
effects on a variety of beliefs and preferences (cf.
Lang and Lang 1992).In short, this is a society of high technology
and extremely intensive energy use. It is also a
country that has developed a tightly organized and
elaborately interdependent economy and social
system, accompanied by vast increases in total
economic productivity. Thus the real gross nation-
al product doubled in just two decades (1959–
1979), increasing at an average rate of 4.1 percent
per year (Brimmer 1980, p. 98). But beginning
with the sharp increases in oil prices after 1973,
the society entered a period of economic stagna-
tion and low productivity that was marked in the
1980s by large trade deficits, greatly increased