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We may have become a more frightened society, but Americans today are also more tolerant of new ideas and other people than at any time in our history.
Consider: A national Roper Poll in 1948 found that 68 percent of Americans preferred not to live in a neighborhood with Catholics, blacks, Jews, Filipinos or members of other minority groups.
Today, only 16 percent hold such intolerant attitudes.
Burns Roper, one of the deans of U.S. polling, said in a recent speech that although much work remains to be done, Americansí increasing tolerance has been one of the most profound changes of the late 20th century. That is at least as important as all the technological changes, he suggested.
The "relentless trend toward tolerance has had all kinds of implications and effects," Roper said.
"Along with the attitudinal changes,... there have been legal and structural changes to our society, including the granting of rights to people who never had them, or had them only on paper back in the 1930s and 1940s.
And that is to the good."
