Middle Class Fantasy

Middle Class Fantasy

Baby Boomers grew up in a middle class culture and we all were taught to believe that the natural goal of any and all societies is to build and nurture an ever growing middle class. Rich and poor are Others to us. A normal life meant that if you were willing to work, you and your family could live in comfort and security. More importantly, that faith in your ability to attain and retain middle class comfort was supported by our government and our developing national culture of movies, books, magazines and most significantly radio and television.

Coming out of the Depression and World War II, the American government followed a policy of internal economic development that included the GI Bill which financed the house I lived in from age 2 to 19. The Interstate Highway System incorporated new freeways in every major city, making long commutes feasible, leading to explosive growth of middle class suburbia. The American government also implemented the Marshall Plan, which supported demand for American made products.

This was a huge success for the American government. The American Dream evolved to a nice thought: Your children will lead a more comfortable life than you did. The Myth of Progress saddled up and rode the Horse of Middle Class Fantasy and we had an economic boom all through the 1960s, even as other social problems involving war and ethnicity took center stage of our politics. But one of the things driving the foment and dissent in the 60s was the general prosperity and complacency of the white middle class who confused the luck of American economic strategy with their own virtue.

George Wallace and Richard Nixon capitalized on this tendency with race baiting, setting the stage of Big Money’s counter attack against the policy of Share the Wealth.

That 50s and 60s Middle Class dream world had its ugly side. It only applied to white people for the most part. In a precursor to today’s witch hunt for Anti-Vaxxers, Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare destroyed more than a few careers for fear of the “spread” of communism. Oldsters like me will recall how the most commonly employed metaphor for the “spread” of the wrong ideology was a contagion. Irony never sleeps.

Another ugly bi-product of the willful sharing of that national wealth to allow comfort and security to a growing majority of the population was that all that “wealth” included a lot of crap being shared, too. So much crap that a half century later the oceans are filling up with it. This essay is not focused on the environmental aspects of industrialization which are probably more significant in the overall scheme of things, but I nevertheless push on.
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Radio and television created a simultaneous national culture, and by the 1950s, we had for the first time in the history of the world a continent wide society that allowed you to share experience with tens of millions of people. This continental nation was a middle class nation. The TV situation comedy became our national mirror.

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver and a slew of other domestic sitcoms showed American family life in the middle class. The problems largely involved the wacky things that children do in their cute but correctible immaturity. None of the Dads worried about losing their jobs. None of the Moms had to work at an outside job. All the kids knew that they had a happy life ahead of them (unless they were unwhite or queer or a Red).

Even on TV shows that were “about” either lower or upper class people, the story was always told from the perspective of the middle class. Sanford and Son came on the air during the transition period for black people on American television, putting the edginess of Redd Foxx in a junk yard – but the story is always told from a middle class point of view. By the same token, Hart to Hart was a “detective” drama with a humorous gloss like The Thin Man series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the story is told from a middle class point of view.

For all practical purposes, America became a Middle Class Country after World War II. Those of us who grew up during this period did not question any of it. It was normal for a country to build, nurture and grow a middle class.

Baby Boomers like me absorbed the ideology of Middle Class America as such an obvious good that there was no reason to even think about debating it. Of course, a society should try to serve the interests of its population. Of course, the only realistic way to share the wealth without civil war is through the development of a middle class. Of course, the only conceivable national political and economic strategy is to divert resources to middle class people, both in terms of liquid cash and infrastructure.

We remain oblivious to how un-normal that post war experiment in limited wealth sharing really was. Over the course of human history, what we call a middle class existed in most societies, but never as anything remotely like a majority. Our lives are an aberration, not normal.
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We were not alone in our assumption that the “normal” operation of any national government would be to further the interests of its people. The USA was at that time in a Great Power competition with the Other Superpower, the Soviet Union. Their claim was not to advance a “middle class” but to abolish the concept of economic class altogether. Implicit in the claim but not much respected under Stalin was the idea of improving material conditions for everybody – not just the rich or the “deserving.”

Once Uncle Joe passed on to his reward, Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the top dog in the Soviet Union. He pursued improved relations with the US, and the Eisenhower government cautiously moved toward a thaw along with him. One of the products of this diplomacy was a Cultural Agreement:
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In 1959, the Soviets and Americans agreed to hold exhibits in each other's countries as a cultural exchange to promote understanding. This was a result of the 1958 U.S.–Soviet Cultural Agreement. The Soviet exhibit in New York City opened in June 1959, and Vice President Nixon was on hand the following month to open the US exhibit in Moscow. Nixon took Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev on a tour of the exhibit. There were multiple displays and consumer goods provided by more than 450 American companies. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a geodesic dome which housed scientific and technical experiments in a 30,000 square-foot facility. The Soviets purchased the dome at the end of the Moscow exhibition.[1]

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Khrushchev surprised Nixon during the first meeting in the Kremlin when he protested the Captive Nations Resolution passed by the US Congress which condemned the Soviet Union for its "control" over the "captive" peoples of Eastern Europe and called upon Americans to pray for those people. After protesting the actions of the US Congress, he dismissed the new technology of the US and declared that the Soviets would have all of the same things in a few years and then say "Bye bye" as they surpassed the U.S.[4]

Khrushchev criticised the large range of American gadgets. In particular, Khrushchev saw that some of the gadgets were harder to use than the traditional way. One of these devices was a handheld lemon juicer for tea. He criticized the device, saying that it was much easier to squeeze the juice out by hand and the appliance was unnecessary. Khrushchev asked Nixon if this device was standard in American kitchens. Nixon admitted some of the products had not hit the US market, and were prototypes.[5] Khrushchev satirically asked "Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?", a reference to Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times.[6] Nixon responded that at least the competition was technological rather than military. Both men agreed that the United States and the Soviet Union should seek areas of agreement.[4]

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What a thought from Tricky Dicky. He argued that it made more sense to show the world that our way of life is worth emulating than having a nuclear war. That kind of common sense has been abolished among the national “leaders” of the 21st Century. And the common sense coming from Khrushchev about the silliness of conspicuous consumption is equally unlikely to come from anybody from the winning side of the Cold War.

That interchange would be unthinkable today. Putin would be up to it, of course, but nobody in the American government today could dream of comparing life styles of ordinary people as a means of “competition.” Our billionaires have more billions than your billionaires! would be a far more realistic contrast today.

Sixty years ago, however, nobody on earth thought it was odd for these two guys to talk about kitchen gadgets and domestic living arrangements as the measure of national success. Like us Baby Boomers who were still in grade school or younger at the time, pretty much the whole world was looking at the end of world wars as a precursor to prosperity for all.

On the other hand, both Khrushchev and Nixon were both deposed by their own government.
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My grandfather was born in 1902 and he never got past the 7th grade. In 1924, he was living in Ottumwa, Iowa, working for the Hormel meat packing plant. He joined the national strike against all the meat processing companies and lost everything. He and my grandmother and my uncle had to leave town, eventually winding up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

He never had so much as a whiff of Middle Class Life and by 1935 he became the leader of a strike at the Morell plant in Sioux Falls. There was violence and my grandfather had to check into the hospital more than 20 times to get patched up after street fighting with scabs and security goons on the picket line. After two years of strife, Morell finally agreed to a union contract – which did nothing but put all the strikers on a preferential rehire list.

That microscopic victory led to 40 years of increasing pay and benefits, bringing packing house workers into the middle class.

After my grandfather passed away in 1991, I had occasion to go through some of his papers. I found the text of an Oral History Account that he had given to a historian at the University of Texas, Arlington. I had never heard a word of family history about his getting busted out in the 1924 strike. In a word, I was flabbergasted.

I asked by grandmother, “I never knew about that business in Ottumwa – a decade later you and Grampa were ready to go on strike again. You had no rational reason to believe it would turn out any better. Why did you and he do such a thing?”

“David, the conditions were intolerable.”

He had never experienced a day of middle class comfort and hope in his life. Neither did the millions of other people who went on strike and fought in the streets for a seat at the American table. They just new that they had enough of getting dicked around. So much of the bullshit was gratuitous – paid vacations were unthinkable, but you could get a week off without pay if you had perfect attendance for a full year. So, of course, guys would come to work sick and make co-workers sick. Notice the perverse logic of humiliation, similar to the current drive to make everybody get vaccinated by threatening to fire them and replace them with unvaccinated National Guard personnel.

For our generation and those born after us, it does not occur to us that our government would try to kick us out of the middle class – or that we might have to fight for it. No, we actually believe that we are entitled to it. We assume that if we just point out that public policy is hurting us, the government will respond rationally to help us out.

This complacent faith in our government to be on our side is our biggest weakness and it is being exploited mercilessly right now.

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Comments

to do the 'middle class' any favors has all but evaporated.
If the definition of 'middle class' is somewhere between zillionaires
and the broke, homeless and desperate, then we do have a shrinking
middle class. Fewer at the top and many more at the bottom.
What has the government done to bouy the dream of american prosperity?
Giving it all away to Wall Street speculators and mega international cartels.
Constant wars, strife and tension. Poverty is not discussed in the media.
It is becoming harder to get a break, let alone feed the needy.
Sheesh

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Dawn's Meta's picture

the middle class, post WWII. Your dad and mom's personal story makes it poignant and present.

Sewing all this history together in an understandable and relatable narrative makes it powerful.

This should be read by everyone as a lesson in how civics and personal economics tie together.

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A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.

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The American Dream was always out ot reach for most Americans. George Carlin noted that's why it is called a dream. Only in our sleep is it believable.

However, the threads of faith are thinning and unraveling before our eyes now for all the but the most befuddled. Work hard and you will get ahead seems laughable now. We know better.

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NYCVG

HA! Work your ass off all of your life and get stuffed down a hole.

the rewards are in heaven, just get in line Wink

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