Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
News

Reich’s ‘Greening of America’ Makes Him Prophet of Youth

By Malcolm G. Scully November 9, 1970







The Chronicle of Higher Education By MALCOLM G. SCULLY

In less than a month, Charles A. Reich has gone from being a 42-year-old professor of law at Yale University to a prophet for the nation’s youth.

The change has been brought about by the publication of Mr. Reich’s book The Greening of America, first in condensed form in The New Yorker in late September, and in its entirety by Random House late last month.

In The Greening of America, Mr. Reich indicts American society for having become a monolithic state with artificial values of consumption and success, and he predicts that young people, who have a “new consciousness,” will restore humanity to the nation’s mindless, mad institutions.

Immediate Response

The reaction began immediately after the article appeared in The New Yorker and has been increasing ever since. The response at the magazine has been compared to that accorded Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

For several weeks after the article appeared, the magazine received more than 200 telephone calls a day from people requesting copies. Hoyt Spelman of the magazine’s advertising staff estimated that it would be weeks before the thousands of letters were sorted out.

The book was sold out within hours at many campus bookstores. It went into its fifth printing at Random House less than two weeks after it was published. After a first printing of 5,000 copies, the number of each printing was raised so that 75,000 copies had been published by the end of the fifth printing.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a spokesman for the publishing house. “There are some books which we know from the start will be best-sellers, but this has come as a complete surprise.”

Mr. Reich approached Random House with an outline of the book and received a quick positive response to it from editor John J. Simon. The completed manuscript was submitted to The New Yorker, where editor-in-chief William Shawn accepted it for publication.

Observers attribute the phenomenal success of The Greening of America both to the vast pre-publication publicity it received -- The New York Times has had at least seven articles on it -- and to Mr. Reich’s ability to pull together a series of ideas abroad in the land into one sweeping theory about today’s society.

Robert Bingham, the editor at The New Yorker who worked with Mr. Reich on the condensation, said the law professor “had just pressed a button that was waiting to be pressed. It is not just an idea whose time had come, but a whole set of ideas that the young people had been acting on but had never stated clearly.”

‘Everybody’s Book’

John Kenneth Galbraith, whose analysis of the “new industrial state” parallels Mr. Reich’s analysis of the corporate state, said somewhat the same thing in a letter to Mr. Reich. Mr. Galbraith wrote that Mr. Reich had said what he (Galbraith) had been trying to say all along.

“It’s no surprise to me that everybody now feels they wrote the book,” says Mr. Reich. “Every observation in it other people could have made and did. It’s everybody’s book.”

Despite that description of universal authorship, the book has not been greeted with universal enthusiasm.

The extent of the comment has been enormous. Virtually every major daily newspaper in the country either has editorialized about it or printed the opinions of syndicated columnists. The weekly newsmagazines have reviewed it. Advertising Age, Home Furnishings Daily, and Fortune have criticized it.

The criticisms have ranged from gentle gibes at Mr. Reich’s wholehearted endorsement of the clothes and music of the young to bitter attacks on him as being both anti-intellectual and anti-democratic.

The reviewer for The New York Times, who was generally favorable, called Mr. Reich youth culture’s “very own Norman Vincent Peale.”

Columnist Stewart Alsop in Newsweek called the book a “bag of scary mush” that has “obvious Fascist overtones.”

States of Consciousness

Regardless of the responses Mr. Reich provokes, however, his book and his theories are sure to be the topic of intense discussion across the nation.

His division of society into three states of consciousness -- those nostalgic for the simpler past, those wrapped up in the values of the corporate state, and those in tune with the aspirations of the young -- is ready-made for cocktail party repartee.

In the meantime, at Yale, Mr. Reich admits that publication of the article and the book “seems to be violently changing my life.”

He joined the faculty at Yale in 1960 as a specialist in public law and property law. Prior to that he had served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, and as a member of two law firms in Washington, D.C.

He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1949 and was graduated from Yale law school in 1952.

At Yale, Mr. Reich currently teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses, “The Individual in America.”

In 1967, he reports, he had a vision of significance of the new life-styles of his undergraduate students, and what impact it would have on the future.

“I felt that until people got this vision they’d go on feeling the country was going to hell,” he said.

The critics disagree over which way leads to hell -- the existing system, as Mr. Reich believes, or the revolution of consciousness that he sees as the escape.


Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up








The Chronicle of Higher Education By MALCOLM G. SCULLY

In less than a month, Charles A. Reich has gone from being a 42-year-old professor of law at Yale University to a prophet for the nation’s youth.

The change has been brought about by the publication of Mr. Reich’s book The Greening of America, first in condensed form in The New Yorker in late September, and in its entirety by Random House late last month.

In The Greening of America, Mr. Reich indicts American society for having become a monolithic state with artificial values of consumption and success, and he predicts that young people, who have a “new consciousness,” will restore humanity to the nation’s mindless, mad institutions.

Immediate Response

The reaction began immediately after the article appeared in The New Yorker and has been increasing ever since. The response at the magazine has been compared to that accorded Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

For several weeks after the article appeared, the magazine received more than 200 telephone calls a day from people requesting copies. Hoyt Spelman of the magazine’s advertising staff estimated that it would be weeks before the thousands of letters were sorted out.

The book was sold out within hours at many campus bookstores. It went into its fifth printing at Random House less than two weeks after it was published. After a first printing of 5,000 copies, the number of each printing was raised so that 75,000 copies had been published by the end of the fifth printing.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a spokesman for the publishing house. “There are some books which we know from the start will be best-sellers, but this has come as a complete surprise.”

Mr. Reich approached Random House with an outline of the book and received a quick positive response to it from editor John J. Simon. The completed manuscript was submitted to The New Yorker, where editor-in-chief William Shawn accepted it for publication.

Observers attribute the phenomenal success of The Greening of America both to the vast pre-publication publicity it received -- The New York Times has had at least seven articles on it -- and to Mr. Reich’s ability to pull together a series of ideas abroad in the land into one sweeping theory about today’s society.

Robert Bingham, the editor at The New Yorker who worked with Mr. Reich on the condensation, said the law professor “had just pressed a button that was waiting to be pressed. It is not just an idea whose time had come, but a whole set of ideas that the young people had been acting on but had never stated clearly.”

‘Everybody’s Book’

John Kenneth Galbraith, whose analysis of the “new industrial state” parallels Mr. Reich’s analysis of the corporate state, said somewhat the same thing in a letter to Mr. Reich. Mr. Galbraith wrote that Mr. Reich had said what he (Galbraith) had been trying to say all along.

“It’s no surprise to me that everybody now feels they wrote the book,” says Mr. Reich. “Every observation in it other people could have made and did. It’s everybody’s book.”

Despite that description of universal authorship, the book has not been greeted with universal enthusiasm.

The extent of the comment has been enormous. Virtually every major daily newspaper in the country either has editorialized about it or printed the opinions of syndicated columnists. The weekly newsmagazines have reviewed it. Advertising Age, Home Furnishings Daily, and Fortune have criticized it.

The criticisms have ranged from gentle gibes at Mr. Reich’s wholehearted endorsement of the clothes and music of the young to bitter attacks on him as being both anti-intellectual and anti-democratic.

The reviewer for The New York Times, who was generally favorable, called Mr. Reich youth culture’s “very own Norman Vincent Peale.”

Columnist Stewart Alsop in Newsweek called the book a “bag of scary mush” that has “obvious Fascist overtones.”

States of Consciousness

Regardless of the responses Mr. Reich provokes, however, his book and his theories are sure to be the topic of intense discussion across the nation.

His division of society into three states of consciousness -- those nostalgic for the simpler past, those wrapped up in the values of the corporate state, and those in tune with the aspirations of the young -- is ready-made for cocktail party repartee.

In the meantime, at Yale, Mr. Reich admits that publication of the article and the book “seems to be violently changing my life.”

He joined the faculty at Yale in 1960 as a specialist in public law and property law. Prior to that he had served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, and as a member of two law firms in Washington, D.C.

He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1949 and was graduated from Yale law school in 1952.

At Yale, Mr. Reich currently teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses, “The Individual in America.”

In 1967, he reports, he had a vision of significance of the new life-styles of his undergraduate students, and what impact it would have on the future.

“I felt that until people got this vision they’d go on feeling the country was going to hell,” he said.

The critics disagree over which way leads to hell -- the existing system, as Mr. Reich believes, or the revolution of consciousness that he sees as the escape.


Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Malcolm G. Scully
Malcolm Scully worked at The Chronicle for 40 years, beginning in 1967. He was editor of The Chronicle Review among other duties.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin