The Nomadic American

So far away doesn't anybody stay in one place any more...

Travelin' around sure gets me down and lonely,

Nothin' else to do but close my mind,

I sure hope the road don't come to own me...

These lyrics, from a 1971 hit recording by Songstress Carole King, have struck a responsive chord in millions of Americans. That comes as no surprise to Social Critic Vance Packard. The song became popular, Packard believes, because it poignantly reflects the pain and yearning of a nation on the move. America has become a land of nomads, he says, a nation of men and women who are rootless, isolated, indifferent to community problems, shallow in personal relationships and afflicted with "unconnectedness and a lonely coldness."

Packard's indictment is detailed in A Nation of Strangers (David McKay; $7.95), the seventh of Packard's commentaries on the American way of life. If the wide appeal of his earlier volumes*--and of Carole King's song--is any indication, Strangers, published this week, may well be another bestseller.

Mobility is not new, and Packard did not discover it. The increasing industrialization of the U.S. has made moving easy, sometimes desirable and often necessary; thus the U.S. has long been a highly fluid society. That fact has been reported before, but only in bits and pieces. Packard is the first to fit the pieces together and assess their meaning.

The shifting population documented by Packard includes not only the obvious categories, such as military men and migrant workers, but also athletes, actors, long-distance bus and truck drivers, salesmen, construction workers and airline stewardesses. Blacks flee the inner cities, and whites flee blacks. People displaced by urban renewal or superhighways are forced to pull up stakes. So, very often, are executives transferred to distant cities; to many of its employees, IBM means "I've Been Moved." The aged migrate voluntarily, becoming "snowbirds" in the sunshine of Florida or California. The young leave home to escape their parents.

Mostly, those who move long distances are "the kind who ordinarily play the major role in holding the community together." Partly because those who stay behind "must settle for second or third best in leadership," social mobility affects non-movers too. Even people who live in one house all their lives may become "psychological nomads: the turnover of people around them is so great that they find themselves with few close ties to friends, kinfolk or community."

Packard musters some extraordinary statistics:

> The average American moves about 14 times in his lifetime, compared with five times for the Japanese.

> About 40 million Americans (one-fifth of the population) change their addresses at least once a year.

> In many cities, more than 35% of the population move every year. In Great Falls, Mont., there is a school that annually loses 70% of its pupils and 30% of its teachers.

> The wives of many managers have had to move their households 20 times in the course of their marriages.

> Some 6,000,000 Americans now live in mobile homes. Even though these homes are not often moved, their occupants feel "a minimum commitment to both home and community."

> At any given time, half of the 18-to 22-year-olds in hundreds of towns are living away from home. Many of them never come back, except to visit.

All of this mobility, Packard believes, is destroying authentic communities and creating some monstrous non-communities. The U.S. now has 13,000 "pseudo towns based on shopping malls," efficient for merchandising but unsatisfactory as focal points for the rootless people who live around them. Trailer parks are not much better, even if they have names like "Chateau Estates": "No matter how you floss them up, most mobile homes are elongated metal boxes." Aerospace communities may look more attractive, but their ever-changing populations are often beset by infidelity and alcoholism (TIME, July 4, 1969).

Almost equally troubled, Packard says, are the towns for "company gypsies." As an example, he points to affluent Darien, Conn., "a transfer town, a bedroom town--and a traveling man's town." Once a genuine community, Darien now frequently observes the traditional small-town amenities without preserving the old warmth. One longtime resident confided to Packard that while she still calls on new neighbors, she has recently done so only when she is sure they are not at home.

In Packard's view, mobility is often associated with both physical and mental illness. He also believes that the anonymity resulting from mobility fosters "nomadic values," especially hedonism and a tendency to live for the moment. Pointing to Stanford Psychologist Philip Zimbardo's experiments in which subjects show no reluctance to give electric shocks to strangers, Packard says that "people become more aggressive when they are in anonymous roles."

Although he deliberately avoids the fashionable term alienation because it is so often misused, Packard reports something akin to it: there seem to be increasing numbers of people who are indifferent to all close associations. Apparently they have what Harvard Sociologist George Homans calls a "lowered social capacity." This may have ominous long-range implications. "Loss of group membership in one generation," says Homans, "may make men less capable of group membership in the next. The cycle is vicious."

As Packard sees it, to break that cycle is the nation's most urgent task. America must "rediscover the natural human community" to which people can feel they belong. Among his proposals: 1) corporations must stop assuming that they have a right to move people around like chessmen; 2) a minimum-income program geared to regional costs is needed to cut migration of workers in search of more pay; 3) home ownership should be encouraged through subsidies to give people "a stake in living where they are"; and 4) open housing must be accepted to eliminate white moves to suburban sanctuaries.

Mobile Americans. In a preface to Strangers, Packard reveals that his concern about mobility springs from his own experiences. As a child in Troy, Pa., he knew everybody within four miles of his father's dairy farm. When Packard was nine, his father made a great leap--115 miles--to become farm supervisor at Pennsylvania State College. His goal: a college education, available at reduced rates to college staffers, for his children. That was a wise decision, Packard believes. But the uprooting was traumatic, especially for his father, who developed a familiar psychosomatic illness: colitis.

"Today," Packard writes, "the nearest relative to my home is 110 miles away." And because so many old neighbors have moved, Packard no longer feels the sense of community he craves.

Convinced that his sense of isolation was anything but unique, Packard began four years ago to apply his own special research techniques to the topic of mobility. Unlike social scientists, who generally assume a theory and then test it, Packard first assembled a miscellany of data. He read studies on mobility by social scientists and, in the absence of an adequate register of mobile Americans, devised his own sleuthing techniques. The best leads, he found, were telephone disconnect orders, because 98% of these are the result of moving plans. Most important, ex-Newspaper Reporter Packard traveled to 24 states and interviewed hundreds of sources. Only when he had amassed a dozen cartons of evidence did he begin evaluating it.

In the past, that method has produced Packard books that were criticized by some sociologists as unscientific. But Packard does not claim to be a scientist; he calls himself an observer and synthesizer. As such, he has sometimes been ahead of scientists in diagnosing the nation's ills, and he has often managed to influence those who do not read scholarly works. The Waste Makers and The Naked Society, for instance, did much to spur the protection of consumers and of the right of privacy. Similarly, perhaps, A Nation of Strangers may succeed in alerting the country to the hazards of mobility.

* The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers, The Waste Makers. The Pyramid Climbers, The Naked Society and The Sexual Wilderness together sold 750,000 copies in hardcover and 4,000,000 in paperback.

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