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Nostalgia for ’50s Gets Close Scrutiny | American Enterprise Institute - AEI
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Article
Nostalgia for ’50s Gets Close Scrutiny
By Robert McCain
Washington Times
June 09, 1999
Conservatives who celebrate “the halcyon 1950s” are in danger of succumbing to nostalgia
by idealizing an era that was “the product of very unusual, even un-American,
circumstances,” author David Frum warned Monday.
“What I want to do is to caution against nostalgia, the most useless of emotions,” Mr. Frum
told an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) audience. Instead, he suggests they “abandon the
idea that it can somehow be remade in the image of the society that waged World War II.”
Many Americans correctly remember the 1950s as “a time of consensus and stability and
respect for authority,” Mr. Frum said. Marriage rates were high, divorce rates were low, and a
man with only a high-school diploma could support a wife and family.
But these “impermanent” and “unnatural” conditions were the products of “a society formed
by war,” Mr. Frum told those attending his presentation in AEI’s Bradley Lecture Series, titled
“Where Did the Sixties Come From?”
He pointed out that from the Spanish-American War in 1898 until U.S. withdrawal from
Vietnam – a 75-year period that included World War I, World War II and the Korean War –
“the United States was almost constantly at war or in imminent danger of war, and even when
it was at peace, its leaders and elites believed that it should be governed in ways that
mobilized its strength in readiness for war.”
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Nostalgia for ’50s Gets Close Scrutiny | American Enterprise Institute - AEI
Mr. Frum, a Canadian who is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow
of the Manhattan Institute, said America at mid-century was experiencing a “blue-collar
utopia created by bombing Japan and Germany flat and granting broad union powers.”
In addition to destroying the industrial base of America’s economic competitors, U.S. victory
in World War II also inspired “faith in the political leaders who bring victory,” Mr. Frum said.
“Americans trusted their leaders. How could you not trust General Dwight D. Eisenhower?”
The “sense of common endeavor” shared by GIs who had served in World War II was the fruit
of a wartime “we’re-all-in-this-together spirit,” Mr. Frum said. That spirit produced political
consensus in the postwar era: “However much Republicans and Democrats disagreed about
the relatively petty issues of domestic politics, they were united on what then really mattered
– the great issues of war and peace,” he said.
While critical of “the liberal devil myth of the 1950s” as “a sexist, racist, homophobic
nightmare,” Mr. Frum suggested that the “almost unbelievable consensus and homogeneity”
of the United States in the ’50s was in part the product of government policies that most
conservatives reject.
“In the 1950s, the top rate of federal income tax was 95 percent,” Mr. Frum reminded the AEI
audience, citing the military draft, strict economic regulation, unrestricted wiretapping,
“urban renewal” and “closed shop” labor union agreements as other unwelcome aspects of
the ’50s.
Conservatives have sometimes cherished a myth “in which the 1950s are represented as a
cross between the Athens of Pericles and Mayberry, USA,” Mr. Frum said. But “never before
in American history had the political authorities enjoyed as much discretionary power as they
did then.”
Such centralized authority “is not the American way,” Mr. Frum said, arguing that the
“wartime discipline” that persisted after World War II “triggered a revolution” in the 1960s.
Many conservative critics, including former federal Judge Robert H. Bork, have focused on
the unrest of the 1960s as a wrong turn in American history. But Mr. Frum, who recently
completed a book about the 1970s that will be published this fall, said it is “more correct” to
locate “this national convulsion” in the 1970s.
Mr. Frum’s skepticism toward “nostalgia” for the 1950s provoked less controversy from the
AEI audience than a remark near the end of his lecture: “I have become convinced . . . that at
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Nostalgia for ’50s Gets Close Scrutiny | American Enterprise Institute - AEI
least one bit of conservative wisdom is wrong: human nature is not fixed and immutable. It
changes all the time. And it will continue to change.”
In a question-and-answer session after the speech, Mr. Frum cited changes in sexual attitudes
– particularly, men’s unwillingness to fight in defense of women’s honor – as an example of
the mutability of human nature that he suggested will lead America “onward . . . toward
something new: new vices, new virtues, new sins and new progress.”
Robert McCain
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