At Lawyers, Guns and Money last week, Paul Campos discusses the image below (from some point in the post-WWII pre-1960s years), which has shown up online with the following sentiment: “What did Democrats find so wrong with this version of America that they needed to completely destroy it and turn our country into the mess we live in today?”
This plays to the same fantasy nostalgia the Reagan era promoted (as David Halberstam wrote about in The Fifties), that the 1950s were a utopian world where a single wage-earner could afford to support the family (which is not a bad thing), Mom was a happy housewife, and everything was innocent and peaceful with none of that sixties chaos. In reality there were civil rights protests, many women (no, not all) starting to realize their lives sucked, and Alfred Kinsey’s research showing premarital sex, adultery and homosexuality were all more common than people thought. Far from being calm and complacent, the 1950s were riven by fear: gays everywhere, communists everywhere, black people refusing to know their place, women seizing too much power (Halberstam doesn’t cover all of this).
Democrats (and liberals/feminists/civil rights activists) didn’t destroy this. If anyone did it was corporate America, shifting jobs overseas (lower regulation, lower pay) and squeezing worker pay as low as possible (while CEO pay skyrockets) to keep Wall Street and the stockholders happy. We end up with a billionaire class that doesn’t give a damn about the rest of us.
And contrary to some of the comments on the post (“they did not ask for a free ride”), this couple probably did benefit from government help — federally backed mortgage, maybe the GI Bill to let the man go to college, Social Security to provide for them later. As Ira Katznelson has written, much of this was unavailable to POC, sometimes by design, sometimes because redlining would keep POC from buying a nice house in the suburbs. Private covenants also kept Jews out of some suburban neighborhoods.
What the original post calls destruction is freedom. The freedom for black families and gay couples to have a shot at this. The freedom of the wife to work if she wanted — as Stephanie Koontz’s The Strange Stirring shows, in several states a husband could legally forbid his wife to work outside the home, among other petty tyrannies. Yes, some women were happy staying home; many of them, as Jessica Valenti says, fought like hell to escape that life. As Kristin Kobes du Mez says, the positive aspects of tight 1950s communities were counterbalanced by conformity and repression, particularly of women.
I suspect for the poster Campos is commenting on, keeping women at home even if they don’t want to be is a plus. The 1950s nostalgia doesn’t envision an improved version of the decade — booming economy but with integrated suburbs, men free to be househusbands, women protected from discrimination on the job — restoring white patriarchy is part of the job. Republicans don’t want a future where drag queens, independent women and Muslims are equal citizens in this Republic.
Case in point, Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles who says Muslims don’t belong in America — pluralism is dead! A part of me thinks he has a point — sharing America with shitty bigots like Ogles obviously ain’t working out, so let’s ship him to Somalia. Sen. Tommy Tuberville is another anti-Muslim bigot who thinks NYC Mayor Zohram Mamdani is no different than the 9/11 terrorists. As Fred Clark says, rejecting pluralism will never stop with rejecting Muslims — as witness misogynist, slavery apologist preacher Douglas Wilson declaring America should ban public displays of idolatry, including Catholic display: “a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary, carrying an image of the Virgin Mary down the street, no. Right? A Eucharistic procession? Probably not.”
Or consider this: “As for the requirement that one of the coin designs celebrate the contributions of women to the great American experiment, the Mint cited the image of a Pilgrim holding the hand of, and being embraced by, her protective male partner.” — a look at how the Toddler administration overruled plans for coins celebrating Frederick Douglass and women’s suffrage in favor of whiter, more male images.
