Summer's Ease and Anxiety

THE land was in its summer rhythms. The unrelenting litany of problems remained--the war, inflation, unemployment, pollution. Ahead loomed a somewhat strange presidential election that might wedge the old divisions wider than ever. Yet for the moment, much of America was suspended in an August pause. Compared with the national mood a year ago--a weary funk of economic uncertainty--there was now even a sense of a new summer sweetness, an ease, or apathy, and in some parts of the country a distinct savor of contentment.

Last summer, according to one estimate, Americans were so strapped that one out of every four chose to forgo a vacation altogether. Now, for all the corrosions of inflation, food prices and property taxes, money seems a bit looser. Some major economic indicators are up again--the second-quarter gross national product registered the best three-month gain in six years. As the squeeze lessened, airlines were reporting new records of passenger travel. The highways glistened with a tidal flow of Americans getting away; truck drivers complained that the roads were glutted with campers. State parks and national forests were overrun--an ambiguous blessing.

The summer of 1972 sometimes bore a gloss of nostalgia. Rock stations piping vacationers to the beach played interminable "golden oldies," the rhythms of the '50s rising over the sunny traffic jams. The mood took others farther back. "Everywhere I go," said Sacramento Printer Gilbert Newman,

"I see young people with deep tans jogging, bicycling. It reminds me of the lazy days during the Depression years I spent in Boston."

The hazy streets of Gary, Ind., cluttered a year ago with knots of unemployed steelworkers, now are nearly deserted as steel production continues to surge. While food prices climbed, farmers at least could savor the rise--and the fact that they are enjoying a 50% increase in federal subsidies this year over last. If the nation's urban ghettos were as scabrous as ever, they were mostly peaceful. In Harlem's 26th Precinct, Patrolman Jim Toner observed with some bewilderment: "The tension is much less here than it used to be. It's been a very mild summer, and people just aren't as uptight. I don't know why." In Cleveland, an annual parade of black militants to honor those killed by police was canceled this year because of lack of interest.

Perhaps the nation always seems more "normal" to itself in the summer months, when its people pursue their private recreations. Despite surface tokens of some peace and national self-confidence, there was also evidence of a deeper restiveness, a persistent undercurrent of malaise. The war remains. Last week the last American ground combat unit was deactivated in Viet Nam, yet more than 100,000 U.S. military men were still pursuing the war from the South China Sea and Guam and Thailand. The bombing was heavier than ever.

The season has also had its share of disasters at home, natural and unnatural. Last week HUD Secretary George Romney toured the Susquehanna River valley, devastated last June by its worst floods in history. There he found a withering anger among the victims. Said one man who had been waiting six weeks for a federally supplied trailer to live in: "If this disaster were handled like the war, you bet I'd have my trailer. But we're not important like that goddamned war."

New York crippled through a mid-July heat wave with almost daily power failures all over the city. In that period, the city had 57 murders in seven days, more than ever before in its history. In the wealthy Chicago suburb of Barrington Hills, four persons in a $100,000 mansion were riddled with gunfire and left dead--no one knew why. In Atlanta last week, a 14-year-old boy was found tortured and mutilated. Life followed art on the Chattooga River in North Georgia, where the film Deliverance was made: a group of drunken mountaineers attacked some tourists floating down the river on a raft.

Australian Rancher Henry Crouch spent six weeks touring the U.S. this summer and was astonished by the dissatisfaction he heard expressed. He found everyone complaining --about jobs, politicians, marriages, morals. Asked Crouch: "With all this affluence, why?" Across the nation, there was a curious sense of mixed ease and anxiety. Said F.W. Boyle, an officer of the Free Will Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn.: "I feel much better than I did a year ago. But how wonderful America could be if we could be together like we were in the '40s. I was in Israel, and I noticed they were just like we were 25 years ago--all together, men and women, not bickering."

Americans seemed to be in an anticipatory mood, with an intuition that they were in transit to a future, which if it was not necessarily malevolent, at least left them profoundly skittish. As Robert Block, a Seattle investment banker, observed: "It seems as if everyone has been taught to live on the edge of disaster so long that they have become used to it. There seems to be no doubt that we are on a tidal wave of social change. In these uncertain times, we can take comfort in good food, good friends and someone who can sing a good song."

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