Learning to Walk a Fence

"Our country is like a boy walking a fence," mused Banker George Christie in Phoenix, Ariz. "After a while he gets so good at it that he quits worrying about falling."

In Phoenix or anywhere else in the U.S., it was hard to detect much worry about falling last week. The week's two long-awaited banner-headline events, Israel's pullback from Gaza and Sharm el Sheikh, and congressional approval of the Eisenhower Doctrine, brought no deep, nationwide sighs of relief because few Americans ever really got tensed up much about either issue. The economy showed scattered patches of anemia--layoffs in the home-appliances industry in Ohio, four-day weeks in West Coast plywood mills--but even people in the patches seemed confident of its basic health.

The U.S. seemed to feel that peace, however fitful, and prosperity, however spotted, would last. And with that mood prevailing, reported TIME correspondents across the nation, Americans were devoting their time, their energies and their conversation primarily to affairs domestic and local.

Peach Buds & Flu. In Banker Christie's Phoenix, spring had come three weeks early, bringing the fragrance of orange blossoms. The talk of the town was the upcoming Junior Chamber of Commerce rodeo, and the talk of the Junior C. of C. was the enterprise of Bright Young Man Lee Ackerman and his aide, Chuck Mueller, who are so convinced of the future growth of Phoenix that they are buying and selling nearby desert acreage that only a jack rabbit could call home.

Kansas City's Topic A was a 1% tax that the city government wanted to levy on earnings so that suburbanites can be forced to pay for the upkeep of the city they inhabit by day and shun by night. In Hollywood the swimming-pool set, thousands strong, responded to an unseasonable temperature in the 80s by flicking winter's debris off the water. Los Angeles and Brooklyn joined in the guessing about whether the Dodgers would really move West. Detroiters based buoyant hopes on the first signs of a heavy spring market for 1957 cars (see BUSINESS). Peebles, Ohio (pop. 4,000) was getting ready far in advance for the biggest event in its history: the World Plowing Contest to be held there next September.

Atlanta fretted about the dying winter's snowy last fling, which nipped peach buds and forsythia blooms brought forth early by a false spring. Wichita grumbled about its flurry of nonfatal but highly uncomfortable flu. Miami complained of nagging rain--but 23,026 racing fans braved it on Gulfstream Park's opening day to bet $1,863,447. Texas rejoiced in the recent soaking rains that brightened parched fields with blankets of green and stirred hopes that the seven-year drought might be ending at last.

Harding & Missiles. Underlying the U.S.'s local preoccupations was some real news of a different sort: after years on end of living with crisis and talk of crisis, the U.S. has settled into a New Normalcy, unhaunted by fears that twitches abroad mean another world war or that economic twinges at home mean another Great Depression.

The New Normalcy is far different from what Warren Gamaliel Harding was talking about in 1920 when, unwittingly adding a word to the language, he called for "not nostrums but normalcy." That was a static, isolationist normalcy; 1957's is a capacity for tolerating crisis and change. With hardly a murmur, key U.S. cities have accepted the sleek Nike antiaircraft missile batteries as next-door neighbors. Scores of cities have faced up to a decline in local industry by all-out and usually successful attempts to attract new industry. Leading example: South Bend, Ind. South Bend was hit hard in 1954 when Studebaker stalled and Singer (sewing machines) pulled out. and a committee of South Bend businessmen set about making the city attractive to industry, saw three dozen firms move in within three years. Last fortnight the erstwhile textile center of New Bedford, Mass, rallied more than 1,000 citizens to a mass meeting to help kick off a new self-help plan for luring new industry.

Age of Jackson. The New Normalcy is not only the process of ensuring prosperity. It is learning to live with what is already here. The Depression-time rarity, the $20 bill engraved with the thin-lipped countenance of Andrew Jackson, has come to be at home in everybody's wallet. In a tangible way, while soothsayers write of a fearful and cautious population, the $20 bill has produced a new "Age of Jackson" and a new age of confidence. And the very familiarity of long green seems to have eased the pursuit of the dollar that Europeans firmly believe to be the U.S.'s chief characteristic. A sign of the times might be detected in Careers, a new board game put out by Parker Brothers, the Salem, Mass, firm that struck it rich with Monopoly in the '30s. In Careers, as in Monopoly, luck is still presented by dice and the practical world by play money, but each player in Careers decides in advance on his own goal--money, fame, happiness or a combination.

Is the New Normalcy a flight from harsh fact, a new isolationism as unreal as Monopoly or Careers? Some observers think so. Says Benjamin Houston Brown, director of Cleveland's Council on World Affairs: "The dangers in the world situation are so painful that people tend to run away from them." Others believe that the U.S. has become too used to leaving things to Ike. "He's the American people's papa," says Miami News Columnist William C. Baggs, "and everybody feels free to leave everything in his hands." But the fact seems to be that the U.S.. perhaps following Ike's example, has learned to live with crisis--and to weight the crises as they come. Americans generally understood the gravity of both Hungary and Suez, but they regard the follow-up steps in the Middle East as one of those things that Ike and Dulles ought to be able to handle without pestering too many other people.

If all this--the low blood pressure and the $20 prosperity--is Normalcy, will it last? Looking straight at the big question mark, the middle-aged momentarily see the ghost of the '30s like an old roll-your-own cigarette machine back in the closet. But for the active executive, as for the active consumer, the question usually brings only a healthy caution or a moment's discomfort. "I don't find anybody really scared," says one steelman, "but there is plenty of studied concern."

And studied concern is a long way from worrying about falling off the fence.

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