Malaise and My Lai

Two-thirds of Americans think most of their fellow citizens, if ordered, would "shoot all the inhabitants of a Vietnamese village suspected of aiding the enemy, including old men, women and children." Such was the finding of a poll commissioned by two Harvard scholars. Unsurprisingly, then, by a ratio of better than 5 to 3, the 989 Americans interviewed thought that Lieut. William Calley Jr. should not have been brought to trial for his part in the massacre at My Lai.

That is dismaying enough in the face of the evidence presented at Galley's court-martial. What is still more worrisome, though, is a conclusion drawn by researchers that indicates a national social malaise. Americans toward the lower end of the economic scale felt most strongly that Calley was only rightfully following orders. Their judgment, says Professor Herbert Kelman, one of the scholars who prepared the study, "reflects their whole relationship to society, the feeling that they are pawns, not independent agents." Kelman thinks that this self-assessment by poorer Americans is accurate: "In reality they are not their own agents; they in fact have no real control over national policy." He finds the situation "pathological." Realistically or not, the more prosperous people questioned in the Harvard survey felt a greater sense of responsibility for their own acts--and thus were more likely to believe that Galley should have been held to account.

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