AND 50 YEARS OF CAPITALISM

THE banners in Red Square, the speeches in Bucharest and Belgrade, the dutiful delegations, the flowers and the fanfare--all heralded the achievements of a half-century of Communism. What has happened to U.S. capitalism in the same period?

Compare an imaginary middle-class Mr. U.S. in 1917 with his counterpart today. After breakfast cooked on a cast-iron stove, Mr. U.S. of 1917 wrapped himself against the early autumn chill, went out to his open Model T, hand-cranked the engine into ear-splitting action, and headed for the office at the blazing 15 m.p.h. demanded by the bumpy, unpaved road. Back at the house, his wife kneaded the dough for the day's bread, then took soap and dishcloth to wash the Mason jars in which she was about to preserve apple butter. When she hurried out to get provisions, it meant going to the grocer, the butcher, the druggist, and the hardware store to get all the items on her list. By the time she got home, it was far too late to stop by for a chat with her neighbor Gladys, five blocks away; nor could she phone to explain, for in those days there was only one telephone for every ten people, and someone was always using the party line. Besides, she had to face the laundry stacked beside the hand-powered washing machine. That evening, Mr. U.S. got home to find his wife so exhausted that she fell asleep after supper while listening to the tenor of John McCormack scratching out of the Victrola that stood in the light of the flickering gas lamps in the living room.

Today, Mr. U.S. finishes his breakfast of frozen orange juice and diet-bread toast, pops a vitamin pill into his mouth, steps into his fastback Barracuda, punches the tape deck button for swing or symphony, and heads for the freeway. The six-lane concrete strip lets him proceed at 65 m.p.h. toward his office in town--except when there are so many other cars going the same way that he can listen to all of Beethoven's Ninth. By the time he gets to the office, his wife has already called--from the pink, push-button Princess extension in the kitchen--to ask him to stop by the shopping center on the way home and pick up the washing she is going to leave during the day at the Laundromat there. She and Mabel next door are going to a theater matinee in the Mustang, but she will be back in plenty of time to take the lamb chops out of the freezer and fix dinner. And they will get the dishes into the automatic washer before 7:30 so they can watch The King and I in color.

Pay & Productivity

That U.S. life has changed dramatically for the better in the past half-century is a commonplace. But some of the statistics that emerge when 1917 is compared with 1967 present a startling contrast. In the period before World War I, the garment industry was emerging from the era of the seven-day week and the $5 weekly paycheck. Today, Muzak competes with the whir of machines, and the average worker gets $2.60 an hour for a 35-hour week. The improvement is reflected throughout industry. Before World War I, the average American factory worker earned the equivalent in today's dollars of $26 a week, while his current yield is, on average, about $115. Put another way, the worker in the earlier period had to work one hour and 35 minutes to buy a dozen eggs; for the same eggs now he spends twelve minutes on the job. A man's suit, which cost him 75 hours of labor then, calls for fewer than 20 hours now.

One key to this unprecedented prosperity is the astonishing productivity--the output of goods and services per man hour--that has trebled since 1917, far outstripping the performance of workers in any other industrial society (in 1960, European workers, for example, roughly reached the level of output attained by the American worker in 1925). In 1917, the U.S. farm worker could feed eight people; today, he feeds 40. In 1917, when the U.S. population was 103 million, the nation's gross national product was about $75 billion (in prices adjusted for inflation) compared with about $800 billion now, for a population of roughly 200 million.

As the nation's wealth has soared, the distribution of that wealth has changed just as strikingly. Before World War I, only 4% of U.S. families earned more than $10,000 a year; today, 25% do. In those days, three out of every five households had an annual income (in 1965 dollars) of less than $3,000. Now that number is down to one in every six.

Owing to the rise of service industries alongside production firms, the number of white-collar employees has long since topped the number of blue-collar workers. Well over 60% of all non-farm families own the homes they live in; in 1917, the figure was 40%. Almost 80% of U.S. families now own an automobile, and one in five families has at least two; in 1917 only 5% had a car. Only 1% of U.S. farms was electrified in 1917; today more than 99% of farms and all other homes have Edison's bulb, not to mention Sarnoff's tube.

There were a mere few thousand holders of company stocks in 1917; now there are more than 22 million with a stake in business. Three million hold shares in American Telephone & Telegraph Co. alone, and one-third of General Electric's shareholder-owners got some of their stock through savings and bonus plans.

Life and death have achieved a new balance in five decades. An infant born in 1916 had a life expectancy of no more than 52 years. This year's child can expect to surpass three score and ten.

College Degrees & Passports

The material rise is only part of the story. There have been cultural gains as well. With paperbacks in every drugstore, reading has soared. Thirty thousand titles were published last year, a far cry from the limited book list of 1917. Magazine circulation has multiplied tenfold in 50 years; each month, an estimated 1.2 billion copies of 650 magazines flow out to the farthest corners of the country. Education's reach has lengthened immensely. Early in the century, perhaps 4% of young Americans between 18 and 21 were in colleges and universities; now, roughly 45% are. Last year colleges conferred 650,000 degrees, close to 15 times the number handed out annually just before World War I. The academic year of elementary and secondary schools has lengthened by one-third in the past 50 years. Today 90% of teen-agers are in high school, against 60% in the pre-World War I days. The increase in travel is equally spectacular. A trip to Florida or California or New York is within the reach of tens of millions who would not have dreamed of it a half-century ago. A trip to Europe is commonplace for many. In 1915, 23,000 passports were issued or renewed by the U.S. State Department; this year the figure is approaching 2,000,000.

Figures can also be painful reminders of the things that U.S. society has not achieved. Who can calculate the square miles of slums that beg renovation or the poverty that remains a blight on the industrial society? No fewer than 30 million Americans make up families that earn less than $3,000 per year--the figure set by the Government as the poverty level.

Yet just over the horizon, along with a gross national product that seems likely to top a trillion dollars by the early 1970s, is an array of new machines, teaching methods, foods and other tools that will help man cope with such compelling problems. The next 50 years promise to provide even further evidence that the capitalist system is the most productive in human history.

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