I grew up after WWII and after the New Deal (and the war) had “cured” the Great Depression. The America I grew up in in the 1950s and 60s was far from perfect; there was significant economic inequality, especially for African-Americans. There was the Cold War and the fear of atomic war, and the concurrent “Red Scare” and gross abuses of McCarthyism. Jim Crow was alive and well in the South, and after the victory of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which declared that “separate was not equal”, strident efforts were made by white people, North and South, to find some way around that, to have their children separate through residential segregation. President Eisenhower had to call out federal troops to escort Black children into a school in Little Rock, AR in 1957 after Gov. Orval Faubus had his police block them, and such scenes were repeated in the 1960s, with segregationist governors such as Mississippi’s Ross Barnett, Georgia’s Lester Maddox, and most famous (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace of Alabama, standing in schoolhouse doors. In many Northern cities there were violent demonstrations by white people against school busing, most famously in Boston. There were many martyrs to the civil rights movement, who had names, both African-Americans and white, from the South and from the North (many of them named in the wonderful song “I’ll be Rested”, by Mavis Staples).
In the 1960s both the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam – and opposition to it -- were prominent. As I entered high school and college, I was actively involved in both the struggle for civil rights and against the war. There were many victories in this struggle. In addition to Brown, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, announcing in a TV speech that “We shall overcome.” And, finally, the end of the Vietnam War, which had become Mr. Johnson’s war.
But there were also a lot of positive things in that era. The end of the war brought a huge expansion of American industry (let’s be clear; the rest of the world’s industrial nations were in shambles) and with it jobs and improved standard of living for American workers, especially white workers. While there were big differences in income, CEOs on average made “only” about 30 times what line workers did, compared to often 600+ times today. The marginal tax rate on the highest incomes was 90%, and corporate income tax revenues were greater than individual. Legislation established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to to insure people’s bank deposits, and limits on stock speculation and misuse of deposits by banks were put in place.
Unions were strong and workers had protections. The violent strikebreaking of the 1930s was replaced by relative peace; unions were able to negotiate not only wages and working conditions, but health insurance for their members (which we are left a legacy of today). The New Deal gave us Social Security for our old age (later, in 1965, augmented by Medicare). It provided for unemployment insurance, and it built infrastructure in our land, in our parks, in our cities. The Wagner Act gave unions rights (later eroded some by Taft-Hartley, but much more than today). Child labor was largely outlawed (with the notable exception of farm work). Workers were able to buy houses, and cars, and even send their children to college. Public colleges, affordable to regular people, expanded. In New York City, where I grew up, I remember my 7th grade history teacher telling us how he was only able to afford an education because NYC had FREE public education up through his Masters’ degree. We were not as impressed as we should have been, because we were too young to remember when these things were not true, and had yet to see them be stripped away.
And stripped away they were. Beginning in 1980, not coincidentally with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency and the ascendancy of the Republican party, particularly in the South, all of these gains were eroded. Tax rates on corporations and wealthy individuals were slashed, repeatedly, under every Republican administration. Middle-income and poor people’s taxes could not make up the difference, and so the services provided by government at every level was cut and cut again. This was the goal, and it succeeded. The wealthy got wealthier by many factors, the poor became entrenched in poverty with little hope of achieving the American dream, colleges became less affordable, also limiting access to that dream, and housing prices went up. The protections that were enacted against wild speculation by Wall St. and banks were gradually repealed, leading to the “recession” of 2008 with the bursting of the housing bubble. People’s retirements, in the past “fixed benefit” (you got your retirement income for life) became “fixed contribution” (your retirement depended on what you were able to afford to contribute) that made a lot of money for bankers and financiers. Unions lost protections, as legislation eroded collective bargaining rights. Access to many public lands and parks became subject to “user fees” making them less available to all of us who really own them.
The weakest and most disempowered parts of the population were blamed for the changes that made our lives more precarious. Working class white people were told to blame poor people, and especially Black people, for the fact that their retirements and job protections were weaker, for the uncertainty of health coverage, and for a long time it has worked, although the truth is that it was zero percent their fault and 100% the fault of politicians and their financial backers.
America “won” the Cold War with the fall of the Soviet Union; whether this was all good for the people of the countries it became remains to be seen, and seems to vary by country, it was actually bad for Americans. Without the threat of a possible “Communist revolution”, the protections Americans had come to count upon could be gradually dismantled in the interest of the wealthiest having it all. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration began construction of the Interstate Highway system. In the 1960s the Kennedy and Johnson administrations initiated space exploration; in an amazing 8 years after Alan Shepard became the first American in space and 7 after John Glenn was the first to circumnavigate the earth from space, Neil Armstrong and his colleagues landed on the moon in 1969. It is impossible to imagine such bold – and costly – undertakings happening in the political climate since, where all resources are privatized.
Because of his pursuit of the Vietnam war, I, and many of my contemporaries, had great antipathy to President Johnson, and it was only much later that I appreciated his great achievements in the area of civil rights and the War on Poverty. Much was made in the 1980s and later of how that War failed, how poverty persisted, how you “can’t throw money” at programs. But that was wrong. The War on Poverty worked, fewer people were poor, more had job opportunities. It was only with the cutting of funding for these programs that they started to fail. It is a long-standing scam; find programs that help the people, cut the funding for them so the wealthy can have tax cuts, and then say “See? They don’t work!”.
Before the COVID-19 crisis of this year, the tattering of our social contract was already clear. Young people – even white young people – were unable to find decent jobs, scrounging for work in the “gig economy”, not having a prayer of retirement funding and often not health insurance, crushed by student debt, unable to imagine buying a house. Union membership dropped, and while there had never been anything close to equity between workers and management, the scales swung so far toward management that there was not even a pretense of balance. The popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders as a presidential candidate was not an issue of “cult of personality” but the popularity of the necessary and reasonable policies he endorsed – healthcare for all not dependent upon employment, full funding of Social Security and Medicare, investment in the infrastructure to create jobs and income for people, not profit for stockholders, free college, etc.
And now, with COVID, the entire world has changed. The US has the largest burden of infections and deaths in the world. It is often attributed to “mismanagement” and poor decisions by an administration populated by incompetents, and certainly there is a lot that. But more important, more longstanding, it exposes the structural flaws of a system built only to make the most wealth for the already wealthiest, which has cut back on safety nets, and left the middle class hanging by its fingernails and poor people out to dry. The pandemic exposes our woeful health care system, and its dependence both on private, and often unaffordable insurance, and hospital that have been encouraged to develop capacity only to care for the most profitable (because insurance pays a lot for them) diseases in insured people, and adopt business strategies such as “just in time” which worked for car manufacturers but has left us bereft of the capacity to meet the challenge of the epidemic.
We have subsidized the fossil fuel industry even as we can see that it caused the global warming and is destroying our climate and threatening life on earth. We have continued to build nuclear arsenals, and continue to have the risk of destroying life on earth through their deployment before climate change has a chance to. Our public policies manifest a cynical disinterest in meeting the needs of, not to mention supporting the aspirations of, the vast majority of people.
I write this not to depress anyone, but to remind the last few generations that this is not the way things always have been, that caring for our people has been cyclic. When I was growing up it was an expectation (at least for the middle and working class) that children would be better off than their parents. Working families would have professional offspring. Life would improve. That can still happen, people, because the reverse trend has not been caused by entropy or the “natural order of things”, but rather by purposeful, mean, selfish policies put in place by actual people to advance their interests at the expense of everyone else’s. Corporations have paid higher taxes in the past, as have the wealthiest individuals. They have not always been allowed to moved their headquarters out of the country for tax purposes and their manufacturing out of the country for cheap labor costs and still be protected by the US government, through bailouts and military force, because they are “American”. We were never a country where everyone was equal, but we were less unequal, and the opportunity for greater equity existed.
So is there hope? Of course there is. Undergraduate students tell me that their generation is aware of these issues and that they will take on fixing them. I hope so. Policies that were put in place by people can be reversed by people, as long as the vast majority of us stay alert and aware and don’t buy the absurd concepts (like “trickle down”) put forward by those with the most money. We need to separate wealth from power; the people should have the power.
And we need to do it before nuclear disaster or global warming make it all irrelevant.
