This, of course, is the same Detroit where General Motors decided in 1954 to combine a number of research facilities into the GM Technical Center north of Detroit in Warren. When a number of the engineers grumbled against having to either move out of Detroit or take longer to get to work, word was passed around that “the Tech Center was not going to have any colored.” I am sure your hypothetical black man was going to be delighted to know that jobs and potential advancement were going to be taken away from him. And while the papers and the white culture soon dropped memories of the 1943 white on black riot for which the blacks were censured by the police for not hiding in their houses and letting the whites get it out of their system, statements and memories expressed by black citizens following 1967 indicate a far different memory.
Once Stalin took absolute power, the “class struggle” on which Marxist communism was based had ended. The Soviets perpetuated the illusion with a claim to be socialist, but the totalitarian state violently prevented any further movement toward Marx’s naive beliefs about a communist country. Leaders and the press in Western nations used the word “communist” to promote fears of a new Bolshevik revolution, and those fears were used to suppress various freedoms throughout the West (and particularly in non-Western nations under Western hegemony). But “communism” was simply the bête noire invoked to rationalize suppression of speech in the West and independence movements elsewhere. What was really being played out was a continuation of the Great Game from the nineteenth century with Britain and the U.S. striving for regional hegemony against Russia.
The Soviets were happy to engage in the same sort of dishonest word play as the West, setting up their puppets wherever they could, of course. However, if the West had not reacted with such stupid fear of the very word “communism,” we would probably have reduced the numbers of wars and deaths that we encountered for decades after WWII. Eisenhower is noted to have told the French that we would not be able to rouse a lot of support for a European empire to hold down an indigenous independence movement, but we could always go fight communism–a significant contribution to the debacle of Viet Nam. On the rare occasion when a nation considered exploring communism/socialism without Soviet pressure, we were willing to sabotage that country, choking their economy and actually supporting revolution as we did in Chile.
Confusing communism for totalitarianism was an ignorant decision that caused more harm than good. Communism is not sustainable and our open hostility to “communism” when we were actually engaged in a power struggle with Soviet totalitarianism probably propped up most of the “communist” countries.
Female WASPs had the option of marrying male WASPs to enjoy some of the fruits of the dominate group, although they of course were subservient to their husband. Not ideal but better than the options for non-WASP folks.
That doesn’t sound like a better option to me, being forced into a legal relationship in which rape was legal and financial dependence was absolute.
Does it really not occur to you that subservience is not a good option, no matter a person’s gender OR race?
I dunno. If I gotta eat a shit sandwich, I’d rather it be topped with mustard than with strychnine.
^ This.
But, honestly, what alternative did you think woman had in those days? A WASP woman could marry a WASP man and enjoy a sliver of privilege along with the shit sandwich, or she could marry a non-WASP man and get a bigger helping of shit - assuming an angry mob didn’t drag her man out of the house and hang him from a tree in the front yard for touching a white woman. Or she could live poverty all her life, possibly be committed to a mental institution for being non-conformist, or some other nasty fate.
Meanwhile, non-WASP women just had the shit-sandwich with no option for upgrade, when they weren’t being abused by WASP men who could get away with all sorts of mayhem.
For those who think the 50s were terrific, either because they remember it that way or from things they’ve heard, here are a few other things I got out of Bryson’s entertaining and exuberant account of growing up in that decade. Summarizing a few that I found especially impressive:
[ul]
[li]In August, 1958, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for a 55-year old black handyman. He had been convicted of stealing $1.95 from a white woman. A pivotal factor in the case was that the black man had also spoken to her disrespectfully. The NAACP was unable to intervene because at the time they were banned in Alabama.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Nuclear bomb tests were going on in the atmosphere all over the place, contaminating tens of thousands of square miles of the planet. By 1958 the average child had ten times the amount of strontium 90 in their blood than they had had just one year previously. So that was one more thing that could get them, if polio didn’t get them first (or the lead in tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, or the nuclear war that everyone was preparing for).[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Let’s not forget the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Red Scare, typified most infamously by Joe McCarthy but it seemed almost everyone was in on it. In Connecticut it was illegal to criticize the government, the army, or the American flag, and most states were similar. Texas could jail you for 20 years for being a Communist. More than 150 major celebrities were accused of sedition, sometimes for things like supporting world peace or the United Nations. In 1951 a British physician who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for helping to develop penicillin was barred from entry to the US for the crime of having visited Czechoslovakia for the World Health Organization to help start a penicillin plant there. The Nobel Prize winning biochemist Linus Pauling, while boarding a plane in New York on his way to Britain to receive Royal Society honors, was removed from the plane and his passport confiscated for having been a peace activist.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]In 1950 Guatemala elected its first true democratic government under Jacobo Arbenz, who instituted free elections and a free press for the first time, introduced unions and a reasonable work week, and ended the corruption of the previous dictatorship. This was bad news for the American company United Fruit, which had previously been pretty well running the place with almost total impunity, so to help them out a little, the CIA organized a coup and installed a company-friendly dictator. Thanks to the CIA’s efforts and its new dictatorship, some 70,000 teachers, doctors, priests, and others who had supported Arbenz’s democratic reforms were never seen again.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Lots of people came to Las Vegas, not just to gamble, but to watch the exciting nuclear explosions in the desert outside of town, of which there were as many as four a month. You could stay at the Atomic View Motel, have an Atomic Cocktail, and watch mushroom clouds that were big enough to be seen from airliners hundreds of miles out over the Pacific. Radioactive dust could often be seen drifting through the city, settling on everything.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Just about everybody smoked. More doctors recommended Camels than any other brand.[/li][/ul]
Really, what was there not to like about the 50s?
Is your point that everything was fine for WASP women, because things were a lot worse for other women?
No, of course not. Were things worse for poor women, immigrant women, women of color? Sure. They still are.
But being raped with impunity, having no access to credit or work that would support an independent life or even housing? If that’s the shit sandwich I’m being served, I would rather it be top with strychnine.
Wow, that’s 180 degrees of what I’m saying.
It sucked for WASP women. It sucked worse for all the other women. Is that clear now?
NO married woman had access to credit. Actually no woman had access to credit, it was standard procedure to require a male co-signer to lend money to ANY woman not matter how old, how rich, and regardless of marital status. It’s not that a woman who married gave up access to credit, she never had it. Women could not finance the purchase of a house or property regardless of marital status.
When my parents were first married my mother was unable to get a bank account of her own - dad could have his own bank account but if mom tried to open one dad’s name had to also be on it. (Maybe I should mention my dad was NOT a WASP).
ALL married women could be raped with impunity by her husband. Pretty much any black woman could be raped by any white man regardless of her marital status and it was highly unlikely anything would be done.
Women got married in part because work sufficient to support themselves was difficult to impossible to obtain, and that was regardless of marital status. It was legal to refuse to hire women for any job. It was legal to pay women less for doing the exact same work as men. Women who worked were viewed with suspicion. Women who worked after dark, or came home for work after dark, and were raped were dismissed with comments like “well, what was she doing out at night by herself anyway?”.
There weren’t alternatives. The only thing really gained by the WASP wife was a chance at a bit more social status and a wealthier husband. Given a choice between a shit sandwich in poverty and low status and a shit sandwich in surroundings at least more physically comfortable I’m not shocked that some would opt for at some physical comfort.
Wolfpup,
Nobody said the 50s were a picnic and your list is correct.
Hey there’s lots of good stuff now: cars last for years without ring jobs or even engine tuning; detergents are great; antibiotics make formerly life threatening diseases unimportant; small pox and polio are almost eradicated; the internet puts encyclopedic information at our fingertips; and semiconductor technology has changed the world.
But the question is - have we improved as a nation? Our politicians are frozen in partisan gridlock; our moronic President is a national embarrassment; education is out of reach - we have narrowed the scope of elementary classes and many higher education subjects cannot return their cost to the student; we are working to limit voting rights and increase gun rights; unions are being suppressed; and we now have an internal passport system.
Crane
:shrugs: They said they were Communist, everyone else said they were Communist, Stalin was the head of the Communist party, no other political parties but the Communist party were allowed, but they weren’t [del]true Scotmen[/del] Communist.
That wasn’t confusion - Stalinism and communist totalitarianism were synonyms. That’s why the term totalitarianism was invented.
The Chlilean economy didn’t fail because of the US - as you mention, communism isn’t sustainable. Earthquakes, droughts, and wide spread famines aren’t caused by the US.
Regards,
Shodan
No, but military uprisings have been, time and again. Pinochet wasn’t a drought.
Ah, yes. The 1950’s when smoking was considered healthful, or not harmful at best and people smoked everywhere.
When gas was 10 cents a gallon and people got about 5 miles to the gallon, in their big cars with no anti-pollution devices.
When the planet was getting very polluted and nobody gave a damn.
Shodan,
Wrangles book “Always With Honor” provides some insight into the communist period. Also the movie “Burnt by the Sun”.
Crane
And no seatbelts or anti-lock breaks or right-side-view mirrors or air bags or lots of other safety measures.
But they weren’t gas gazzlers, mostly because the engines were much smaller. The fleet average in the 50s was around 15 mpg, a number than wouldn’t be exceeded until the 1980s. The difference today is that there are many more high mileage cars, an effect that is lessened since trucks and SUV’s (which are classified as trucks) are measured separately and make the numbers look better than they really are.
And, yes, it was so great that nobody was queer. After all, homosexuality was considered a mental illness and was illegal. That was so much better.
That was still true in Louisiana in 1978. My wife, who was making most of the money since I was in grad school, was told that she could not get a check cashing card at the grocery without my signature.
She left two bags of groceries at the register and left.
It was called the Head and Master Law. It was just getting repealed then and some legislators were upset.
Shrug, yourself. Being “anti-communist” because one specific movement became totalitarian is rather like looking at the U.S. involvement in banana republics, the suppression of the Philippines independence movement, and similar events or the democracy of Athens maintaining an empire that preceded (and led to) the Peloponnesian war and drawing the conclusion that democracies must be imperialist, thus providing a basis to condemn democracy in its totality, (as Plato and Aristotle did).
The Chilean economy would probably have collapsed on its own, but any attempt to pretend that it failed in its short lifespan without the direct interference of the U.S. is either naive or willfully ignorant.
Using the existence of some totalitarian places to rationalize the suppression of free speech in one’s own nation or to rationalize the imposition of authoritarian regimes on other countries in order to “defend” against “communism” is a misguided and evil effort.
Willful ignorance yourself. A communist takes over Chile, ruins the economy, shuts down the press, outlaws all other political parties, and attempts to ally itself with totalitarians. But it’s the fault of the US because it opposes the Soviet Union when it took over eastern Europe and East Germany and backed the invasion of South Korea and backed totalitarian rebellion in Cuba and attempted to subvert Greece and Turkey.
Regards,
Shodan
Just curious- is there ANY period of history that people are allowed to look back on fondly?