One Nation Divisible ( Richard Polenberg )

The national government has actively promoted and enforced economic and social legislation to influence class relations in the U.S., but the long-term effects of such policies have been minimal. Despite Kennedy's assault on poverty in 1963, more than three decades later, poverty still poses a national threat to America. Comprehensive, across-the-board governmental programs did not work in the mid-1960s, and their legacy is a nation still divided by poverty, class, and racial distinctions.

In efforts toward affirmative action, in 1969, the Census Bureau did something it had never done before--it asked Americans to identify themselves by ethnic origin. Self-identification replaced inference as a means of distinguishing racial or ethnic groups. Concurrently, however, governmental attempts at affirmative action went hand-in-hand with governmental attempts at watering down, or subve

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nal unity, and "most citizens accepted that interpretation in good faith" (p. 47). The government's mobilization toward the war effort was painted in broad strokes as a forced march toward freedom, and away from slavery. With regard to American society and values in World War II, government officials held that "By making this a people's war for freedom, we can help clear up the alien problem, the negro problem, the anti-Semitic problem" (47). Entry into the war was thus seen as a unifying force for reconciling diversity within a society divided by class, race, and ethnic identity. Obviously, because a nation cannot always be at war, such a "solution" is short-sighted, and, at the time, served only as a smokescreen aimed at a more naive American public. Class bias persisted, as evidenced by army screening procedures during the Viet Nam War. Although people may have been more sensitive to, or cognizant of, racial issues during this period, as Harvard's academic paper, the Harvard Crimson, pointed out (229), class bias has endured in American society with a life of its own. A section from Polenberg's chapter on Viet Nam indicates that, during war time in the 1960s, racial and class discrimination pervaded army policy, in the f
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Approximate Word count = 1666
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)