When America was great
There is a strong suggestion in this campaign season that the country has seen much better times. When steelworkers, autoworkers, and miners never wanted for jobs and America's factory were humming and China was still thought of as a destitute country with hungry kids of which a mother might remind a child if they didn't eat their packed lunch or finish their dinner plate. I suppose that would have been sometimes in the fifties and sixties.
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| Fifties kitchen and female role model |
Polls have asked Americans whether they prefer the past to the present. In March, Pew asked people whether life was better for people like them 50 years ago — and a majority of Republicans answered yes. Trump supporters were the most emphatic, with 75 percent saying things were better in the mid-1960s.(NYT)
Thinking of my American hometown of Baltimore, the mid-fifties was when Baltimore had 950,000 residents, Bethlehem Steel had over 30,000 employees, General Motors had a plant here and Domino Sugar was still owned by Domino. McCormick spices were ground and packed right at the Inner Harbor, with active commercial shipping piers on Pratt and Lombard streets among others. Every rowhouse in town was packed to the rafters and women scrubbed the marble steps on Fridays. There were four department stores on Howard Street, where the ritziest shopping in the region was found. Children pressed their noses on the plate glass storefronts to see the holiday decorations, and the suburban malls, derivative of the urban commercial street, were mostly in the future.
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| Streetcars in Philadelphia 1955 |
Streetcars rumbled through almost every street and house-wives had a home-cooked dinner on the table at six. Gasoline cost 29 cents a gallon. Would there be anything not to like?
The white males who believe that those times were better than today may not care that during those days black Americans could not use the same restaurants, water fountains, swimming pools, or lunch counters or that they were barred from entire neighborhoods by discriminatory real estate practices. They wouldn't remember the Morgan State students of the class of 1955 staging lunch counter protests at Read's Drug Store on Baltimore's Howard Street.
The retro crowd may also not care that in those days women were kept away from many university departments, had no access to good jobs and had been essentially asked to stay home after the war to make room for the returning GIs. Nostalgic "redneck" males may also not miss espresso, lattes, sushi, or craft beers; nor that there wasn't any organic lettuce in the store then. They may swallow a bit harder when they find out that McDonalds just began to build their chain then, so no predictable universal burgers, just whatever the local drive-through offered. There may have been a local drive-in movie and a lot of necking in the backseat but there was no birth control pill and there was an expectation that the man who got a woman pregnant would marry her and raise the child, no matter what.
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| smoke and smog hanging over all urban streets |
For a person used to living in today's world, no matter what kind of Luddite he may want to be, life in 1955 would take lot of getting used to with its stifling contentedness with material consumption in which it was inappropriate to question authority. Even on a mundane and practical level of simple survival, it would be tough to climb into one of those 8 mpg gas guzzlers of 1955 where the front seat would be soft as a sofa. There was be no air bag, no seatbelt and the chance of a fatal crash was many times higher than today, with steering columns impaling drivers and passengers flying through windshields. An ambulance was a primitive station wagon and shock trauma stations had still to be invented. There also wouldn't be a helicopter to whisk an accident victim anywhere. Well, a real macho would probably do without all of that sissy stuff, but he may notice how slow these cars accelerated, how bad their road holding was, how often the car wouldn't start because of moisture in the distributor, how frequently the muffler rusted through and how terrible the brakes were. And a regular model wouldn't have an air conditioner.
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| "glorious" US Ford cars |
Of course, the fifties state of knowledge and progress would have many down-sides. A visit at the dentist would cause severe pain, because anesthesia was primitive and the high speed drill had not been invented yet. The only way to communicate with the outside world would be a wall mounted corded phone in the kitchen over which the whole family would fight. Long distance would require an operator and cost a fortune. The TV would have a small screen with lots of ghost pictures and a terrible resolution. It was probably still black and white, and football or baseball was hard to follow. There wouldn't be instant replay or zooms, in fact there wouldn't be any replay (the first version was invented in 1955).
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| Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point, Baltimore: Spewing fumes |
To send grandma a picture of the kids one would need to buy film, snap pictures until the film was full, bring it to a store, wait for it to be developed, pick it up and then pay a lot for prints that were tiny, had a white border, were usually unfocused and either too dark or too bright. The radio was usually AM, scratchy, and terrible to listen to. For the favorite music one had to go to a record store and buy cheap singles or expensive LPs and run them on those finicky record players where the needle always got dusty and jumped the grooves.
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| Segregation and Jim Crow laws |
Downtown was terribly congested with streetcars going every which way, some horse carriages still mixing in at times and most streets still being two-way. Signals would never turn green just because a car showed up, they were all on a fixed timer unless a cop operated them manually at rush hour. There hung a terrible stench of gasoline and exhaust in every street, the car spewed it out in enormous quantities and fully unfiltered. The gas was leaded and so was paint, and breathing was hard for the very young and the very old. Not only in the streets but also inside cars, in restaurants, bars or meetings because everybody smoked. The average life expectancy for males was only 66.7. The suspicion that all the lead has damaged the brains of those who are so nostalgic for the times fifty or so years back would not be entirely unfounded.
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| Whiteness as principle, even scrubbing white marble |
Movies were incredibly saccharine and trite, television slow, and kids would still get an occasional spanking in school. Folks who hadn't moved to the suburbs yet would have to endure hot days in the city apartment or rowhouse without air conditioning. If they lived in the country, they may to have put coals into a stove or even split wood.
There was no fear of terrorism but fear of communists and the atomic bomb. Little kids would practice to protect themselves against nuclear attack by crawling under their desks. Defense spending was a whopping 10% of GDP (today it is about 5%). Taxes were sky-high. Top earners (above $400k) had to give up to 91% of regular earned income to the feds. Capital gains tax was 25%. The government was strong and everywhere. The Cold War was in full swing, there was a draft and left-leaning people were subjected to McCarthy's inquisition(although that again may not bother the white male longing for the fifties).
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| work in the steel mill |
Work in the factory wasn't glorious by any means, the fact that a single wage earner could usually support a family notwithstanding. As the markets hummed, the machines were cranked to higher speeds. They were noisy, relentless, and without much in terms of safety devices. No ping-pong tables in the corner. Steelworkers occasionally disappeared in molten steel, mines had low safety standards (over 400 miners died in 1955), and workers who didn't die from accidents often acquired lung disease. Power tools and machines everywhere lacked the safety switches and devices that protect us today. Farmers and construction workers did back-breaking labor, and there were no migrant workers from Mexico or elsewhere to do the most laborious and menial jobs.
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| Burning river, Cleveland |
Clothing, bedlinens and shoes in the department stores weren't made in China, but they cost a lot more by today's standards considering that the annual average wage was just a bit over $4,000. An average car took out about six months of pay, about the same as today, but it had much less to offer all around;tires that would go bust after 10,000 miles or so and had to be changed for snow tires in winter, the cars constantly needed oil changes, the spark plugs were always getting gummed up, and so on. A pair of dress shoes cost around $13.99, 0.35% of the annual wage, that would be a $175 pair today.
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| Dentist in the Fifties |
That all this is declared to be of concern only to "elites" and liberals is what makes the debate about American greatness in the current election so scary. Females, blacks, Asians, Latinos or gays wouldn't be enamored with times in which they were all second or third class citizens in the first place. Anyone who cherishes knowledge, refinement, and diversity would not want to live in the Fifties again, not if one could know how much better and more exciting life would become, all remaining problems notwithstanding.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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