Last week subscribers to FORTUNE could study that magazine's bold free-hand portrait of the U. S. Ten years ago the first issue of the magazine went to a handful of charter subscribers; through the following 120 months FORTUNE editors investigated and wrote about businesses flourishing or under the weather, U. S. citizens sanguine or depressed. To celebrate its first ten years, FORTUNE took on its biggest job—to size up the U. S., to sum up its decade's experience.
Result is a big, handsome issue of twelve articles (100,000 words). 135 photographs, one map, nine reproductions in color of U. S. paintings and prints, an abundance of charts in color, and a dec laration that a new era in U. S. history has begun.
Physically, the U. S. that emerges from FORTUNE's pages is no land to be de pressed about. To generally known superlatives about U. S. resources, the leading article, The U. S. A., contributes new ones: the amount of sunlight that falls on the different regions of the country; the potential mineral energy stored in the mountains of Wyoming and North Da kota; the potential water power that thunders down the rivers of the North west. Winding up ten years of fact-finding, FORTUNE's editors came out with: "Almost all the serious problems that now confront the U. S. have their origin . . . in the achievements of the U. S. They are not problems of poverty, but problems of abundance."
Most startling achievement that FORTUNE records: that throughout ten years of depression the U. S. citizen's power to consume has increased more rapidly than ever before in history. Charts prepared by rotund little Richard Buckminster Fuller, creator of the Dymaxion House and Dymaxion car, establish that, in relation to each citizen in the rest of the world, the U. S. citizen is rich in the forces that developing technology has potentially made available, so rich that "the important fact is not that an old era has passed but that a new era has been born. . . ."
Framing FORTUNE's account of the dispossessed are pictures of a Tennessee family in a poverty-stricken mountain cabin; framing the story on U. S. culture are quotations from Walt Whitman and an album of U. S. folkways, covering U. S. unions, U. S. salesmen, the 30,000 U. S. industrial managers and the 32,000.000 U. S. farmers. In other articles, FORTUNE covers U. S. opinion in a survey, conducted by Poll Taker Elmo Roper, that measures U. S. opinion about itself.
>Over 79% of the people believe they belong to the middle class.
>65% would prefer to work for themselves.
>61% would rather gamble on a job with a high wage and an even chance of getting fired or promoted; 56.2% believe that interests of employers and employes are the same. The average American never expects to have a domestic servant, believes his children will have a better chance than he had, believes in the Bill of Rights, but is wary (40.2%) about the preaching of doctrines that might in the long run endanger those rights.