1950 – 2000: a golden age?

A friend wrote:

Looking back on the range of our lives, I think we’ve lived in a golden time, notwithstanding some awful things—the Vietnam War being the most predominant—but we have lived in a time when our country was king of the world and stood for morality. Obviously, we did awful things secretly—see Brazil, Guatemala, etc.—but overall, at least we stood for helping others, beginning with the Berlin airlift, and now all of that has been destroyed.

Well, yes, but . . .

For privileged, educated middle- and upper-middle-class Americans, the post-WWII era was a kind of liberal paradise in many ways. Well-funded public schools, often staffed with the last generation of women teachers whose like in the future would opt for medical school, or law school, or careers as corporate executives. Safe, clean neighbourhoods in often new suburban developments. Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Little League, Friday night football games at the local high school. Generous financial aid for college education. Free speech, faith in progress and an even better world in the future. Rising standards of living; each generation a bit better off than their parents. The ugly past of slavery and two World Wars and the Holocaust and the Great Depression all consigned to history. Optimism!

But for racialized and marginalized minorities, the picture was quite different. We don’t really need to go into the poverty, the redlining, the police abuse, the excessive rates of incarceration, the exclusion from schools, jobs, housing, and in the South, transportation, lodging, even parks and recreation. We all know now, I hope, about the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to slander, arrest, and murder Black activists and anyone else threatening the status quo. But let’s go back to those idyllic white suburbs. I remember being on the playground or sitting on the curb in my neighbourhood trading baseball cards. When we felt we had been cheated, we said we had been “jewed” or “gypped.” I had no idea what these words meant, but they show how pervasive such attitudes were. Non-whites and non-Christians were “other.” They were feared and disliked. They were mistreated if they came near enough to be mistreated. They were segregated, either formally or informally, into Black areas, Jewish neighbourhoods, Latino neighbourhoods, Indian reservations, and we white people never strayed into such areas. I remember being on the bus with the high school football team and the pep band in 1966 or 1967, going to an “away” game versus a school with a large Hispanic population. We chanted, in chorus: “Tacos, tacos, greasy, greasy, we can get this one, easy, easy!” The racism was casual, automatic, baked in, unquestioned, and ubiquitous.

Meanwhile, for the white American working class, their post-war paradise was all about good union jobs in factories—jobs that paid much better than the jobs those suburban college kids could aspire to. Rising incomes, good pensions and benefits, own your own home, two cars in the driveway, a vacation cottage, maybe a boat, holidays in Vegas or Honolulu. All-white neighbourhoods and schools, mostly all-white workplaces, with the better jobs held almost exclusively by whites. Church every Sunday. Saturday night in the tavern or at the bowling alley. For the young, rock ‘n roll, fast cars, hot dates. The tough guys would go into Hispanic or Black neighbourhoods and pick fights. Remember West Side Story? In the early ’70s I was hitchhiking in Idaho and got a ride with some young cowboy types, not much older than I was. They told me that one of their favourite entertainments was beating up drunken Indians.

There was a good deal of violence at home, too. Corporal punishment for the kids at school and at home, not just spanking with the hand but with paddles or belts. Domestic violence by a generation of men dealing with undiagnosed post-war trauma who self-medicated with alcohol and then took out their frustrations on their wives, girlfriends, and children. Even the jokes were typically cruel and demeaning. Taunts and physical bullying were thought to be an essential part of a child’s upbringing, especially for the boys, who had to be tough to survive in a tough world. No one wanted to be a sissy or a cry-baby. The playgrounds were often dangerous, frightening places where you either had to stand up for yourself or find a protector who would stand up for you.

In elementary school we ordered cheap paperbacks from the newsprint Scholastic catalogs that were given out to us three or four times a year. I remember the heroic portrayals of FBI agents protecting us against communists, defending our freedom. On television I watched westerns in which the bad guys really did wear black hats and the good guys wore white hats, and I learned that America was the good guy riding the white horse and doing the right thing all over the world, spreading freedom to the dark places where bad people were in charge. The racist subtext escaped me. It was JFK’s murder that started to wake me up to the lies. Edmund Wilson’s introduction to Patriotic Gore presented the Cold War not as a struggle between Good (us) and Evil (them), but as “the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism, of a sea slug of vigorous voracity in the presence of another such sea slug.” I learned that good, kindly Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of World War II, had approved the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo because he threatened US access to vital mineral resources; and that Ike had cancelled a promised referendum in Vietnam after being informed that Ho Chi Minh’s communists would almost certainly win any such vote. And so on. The white hat remained, but instead of representing Good it seemed instead to represent racial and national dominance, both political and economic. This correction of the picture painted by US propaganda in the 1950s need not go to extremes: no one I know, given a choice, would have preferred to live in the Soviet Union or in China or in Castro’s Cuba (unless, like Assata Shakur, you were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list).

So, yes, the half-century that followed the Second World War was a kind of liberal golden age, so long as you were a white American or Western European (and, preferably, male). And perhaps the ideals that either fueled or masked (or both) the dark side of that golden age—perhaps those ideals are in the end more important than the lies and shortcomings behind or beneath them. I had a conversation years ago about the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner who kept an enslaved mistress and fathered several children with her and then denied their paternity. How could such a man assert that “All men are created equal” in a document called the “Declaration of Independence”? And the cabbie I was talking with—a brown-skinned immigrant—unfazed by Jefferson’s scandalous behaviour, just smiled and said, “Well, maybe his beautiful words are more important than how he lived.”