Good morning.
Or is it?
If you were born after 1945, as were Bill Clinton and about 190 million others, you’ll have to take it on faith, and on Bob Dole’s memory, that this is not such a good morning; that our good mornings–and noons and nights–happened long ago in a place called the United States of a Better America.
“To those of you who say it was never so, that America has not been better,” Dole proclaimed, as he formally accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president, “I say you’re wrong, and I know because I was there. I have seen it. I remember.”
Dole was not specific in his speech about when this “better place” existed. But it’s safe to assume–in the ’20s he was but a lad; the ’30s were wracked by the Depression; and World War II occupied the first half of the ’40s–he means the years between the end of the war and, for lack of a more dramatic bookend, the JFK assassination.
But memory is a notoriously unreliable thing. It can play tricks. Did this “better place” that Dole referred to–adding that it was distinguished by “tranquility, faith and confidence in action”–really exist or is it another pleasant memory mirage?
“Memory,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “is the diary that chronicles things that never have happened or couldn’t possibly have happened.”
But there was much about America that was
obviously better in the 1950s. And much of that is described by Alan Ehrenhalt in his 1995 sociological study, “The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community Life” (Basic Books).
“In Chicago and America, the 1950s was a time of communities that were, for the most part, familiar and secure; stable jobs and relationships whose survival we did not have to worry about in bed at night; rules that we could live by or, when old enough, rebel against; and people known as leaders who were entrusted with the task of seeing that the rules were enforced,” he wrote.
For most, it was a time of prosperity and wholesomeness of respect for the flag, parents, country and authority; of streets that were safe at night and storekeepers who knew your name. Add to that picture such images as Elvis and “I Love Lucy,” air conditioners and Willie Mays, Jack Kerouac and the Kinsey Report and, indeed, the time seems to fit the definition given to it by Life magazine: “The Nifty Fifties.”
It was different for others. Paul Goodman, the late educator and writer, called it an “extraordinarily senseless and unnatural time, as society was a closed room with a rat race as the center of fascination, powerfully energized by fear of being outcasts.”
Add to that such things as the Korean War, the Cold War, Joe McCarthy, H-bomb tests, the murder of Emmett Till, and terrible racial inequities, and the time is closer to Norman Mailer’s description: “one of the worst decades in the history of man.”
“Economically, the 1950s were certainly better, for most,” says Ehrenhalt. “It was a time of unexpected prosperity. `I’ve got a house, a new Chevy. Whoever would have believed it?’ It was a time when one could live a comfortable middle-class life on one income; could play with all sorts of new toys that made life easier–TVs, dishwashers, air conditioning. There was an optimism, especially economic, that does not exist today. Read the articles of the time and they talk about finding a cure for cancer in 10 years.”
Time smooths rough spots
Any era must cope with its good and evil aspects, but as one ages there arises a powerful urge to mythologize–as the rough edges of reality become obscured by time–the past as idyllic. Dole, whether vote-seeking or sincere, is trying to tap into the same sort of feelings that make many of us believe America once as dreamily delightful as portrayed in Norman Rockwell’s paintings; as full of hope, happiness and promise as dawn on a Kansas plain, thick with waving wheat.
Memory’s ability to offer a series of pretty pictures effectively eases present pains and problems. But nostalgia is not the exclusive property of 73-year-old Republican presidential candidates.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, shortly after her husband’s 1993 inauguration, told The New York Times, “I want to live in a place again where I can walk down and street without being afraid. I want to be able to take my daughter to a park at any time of day or night in the summer and remember what I used to be able to do when I was a little kid.”
That’s part, surely, of Dole’s dream–of everyone’s.
We all yearn for the best of our youth.
But as Ehrenhalt says, “We don’t want the 1950s back. What we want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical schoolmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100 percent Americanism and the sinfulness of dissent.”
One simple fact: “The good old days” have always been good for those who could afford to make them so–for the comfortable. The afflicted have always had a tougher time finding bright memories.
Most Americans once looked to the years between the end of the Civil War and 1900 as their “good old days.” In his fascinating pictorial study of this time, historian and archivist Otto Bettmann wrote that by the 1920s “this period receded into a benevolent haze . . . (creating) a brittle veneer that covered widespread turmoil and suffering.”
Thus is it in every era.
`Good old days were rotten’
Bettmann titled his book “The Good Old Days–They Were Terrible.”
Scott Craig, an Emmy Award-winning Chicago documentarian, laughed when he heard that and then he told a story.
“I was interviewing a group of old miners in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and they were weaving funny story after funny story,” said Craig. “So I said, `It seems like those were really good days,’ and one of the guys gave me this steely look and said, `The good old days were rotten.’ “
Craig spent more than a year interviewing nearly 100 ordinary Chicagoans for a series of “Chicago Remembers” documentaries that aired on WTTW-Ch. 11.
The shows focused on the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
“It’s really a mixed bag, how people remember the ’50s,” says the 62-year-old. “Coming out of a Depression and war, people seemed to value the little things, playing cards and listening to the radio, as they started to experience this heady prosperity. Like Dole, they would rather not remember the pain.”
Ehrenhalt thinks that Dole’s memory message lacks the avuncular charm and savvy of Ronald Reagan, whose series of “Morning in America” TV ads during his 1984 re-election campaign gave us stage-set small-town Main Street scenes.
“Dole doesn’t give off a friendly glow,” says Ehrenhalt, who is 49. “He’s not like some grandfather talking to you about the joys of making lemonade and drinking it on the porch. He’s cranky. And I can guarantee that the older people in (Dole’s hometown of) Russell in the ’50s were thinking that the years after World War I were better than the ’50s.”
It’s all then a matter of perspective and prosperity. Those who grew up in Lake Forest obviously have more “good old days” than those who might have walked from the hardscrabble rural South to settle in urban housing projects.
In the generational square-off that is sure to form a major subplot of this year’s presidential election, we are bound to hear much about the United States of a Better America.
“It will be a case of both generations practicing nostalgia,” says Erhenhalt. “Clinton for his childhood. Dole for his young adulthood. Everybody likes to look to their past as a golden time.”
So, have a good day.
It may one day come back to delight you.
