The Amazing Voyage

The casual European who puts his glass to his eye is likely to identify the U.S. today as a sort of gigantic liner on a luxury cruise. She sails serenely into the atomic age, with a rich mixture of smoke pouring from her stacks. Her paint and brightwork are spick-and-span. Lights burn brightly from every porthole, and occasional snatches of music float out. Her passengers, sports-dressed and bullion-blessed, spend seemingly endless hours on deck playing shuffleboard.

But the nature of the problems that concerned the U.S. last week proved that this is a very different kind of craft. In Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court implemented its bold decree against segregation in public schools with a flexible and practical plan for carrying out a social revolution through a form of legal evolution. This was no luxury-liner decision: it promised a generation of litigation, a continual nagging at the conscience and the legal ingenuity of the land until the change was completed. In Detroit, having rejected an offer of stock ownership in the Ford Motor Co., the 140,000 hourly rated Ford employees won a concession to the principle of the guaranteed annual wage. Strike or no strike, the hard give-and-take of bargaining had lifted the autoworkers toward a new and more secure place in the U.S.'s fourth-ranking industry. Every thoughtful American knew that G.A.W., like desegregation, promised plenty of trouble in the years ahead, when it would be applied to more and more industrial situations.

But the prospect of that kind of trouble did not cause the U.S. to alter its course of rapid social change. Far from being in these days of increasing prosperity a relaxed luxury liner drifting through seas of self-satisfaction, the U.S. is, more than ever, on a cruise of experiment, an amazing and perilous voyage of discovery toward the unknown potentialities of brotherhood that may lie beyond mere material prosperity.

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