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Memories Of The Golden Age

By Peter Goodchild

12 September, 2009
Countercurrents.org

The 1950s and 1960s were a kind of Golden Age, perhaps for the average westerner the closest thing to paradise that has ever existed. The Second World War had just ended, and most of the world was now safely controlled by Americans (even if the world didn’t necessarily want to be safely controlled). In the U.S., the gap between the rich and the poor was about as small as it had ever been, or ever would be. Even the Vietnam war was, I suspect, merely a sort of hubris to some extent, a kind of excessive optimism about the Pax Americana. It may have been World War II, again, that began the American fascination with things Polynesian. Rodgers and Hammerstein produced their musical South Pacific in 1949, and in 1959 Hawaii became the fiftieth state.

At some point in my pre-high-school days, in the early 1960s, my family was invited to spend a weekend with some wealthy friends who owned a beach house on one of the wide sandy stretches of the New England coast. The waves on that beach were so large that I could ride to shore simply by spreading my arms and floating on the great crests. That night, the couple’s grown-up daughter, who had just returned from Hawaii, demonstrated the hula dancing she had learned. My sister and I, however, had already been sent to bed.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, life was certainly different. The middle class was defined by long working hours and by consumerism. One might expect these two characteristics to be mutually exclusive, but they weren’t.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average family’s income was reasonably steady through the last half of century, but it was also true that eventually two spouses were working rather than one. It was also a fact that the number of weekly working hours had crept upwards for several decades. These two factors meant that the average person’s pay per hour actually decreased considerably. An additional piece of useful information is the case of what might be called the “five-percenters.” While most family incomes remained steady, the upper five percent of American families had their income shoot up considerably over those years. There was at least a five-fold increase in their income, and the figure is even greater if all the various perks of executive status are included. It’s also important to remember that “income” and “wealth” are not always synonymous; for the rich, income may be only a small portion of overall wealth.

But even the middle class in the late twentieth century didn’t look as if it was starving. In The Overworked American, Juliet B. Schor notes that in the 1950s the average American house had been 750 square feet, and it had four inhabitants. By the end of the century it was 2,000 feet, although it was likely to be inhabited by only two or three people.

Schor explains that middle-class people are paid well, but that they are not allowed to keep their earnings. They are pressured to remain constantly in debt. It is not enough to own an automobile; it must be the right brand. It is not enough to own a house; it must be big enough, and it must be in the right neighborhood. It is not enough to have obedient children; one must enroll them in the right private schools. There are clothes to be bought, there are clubs to belong to, there are the latest electronic devices to be bought.

Finally, she says, there are several reasons why one cannot even drop out of the rat race and get a part-time job. The principal reason is that one would be ostracized; one would be cast out of decent society. But the other reason, closely related, is the lack of real choice. Part-time jobs are largely service-sector jobs, low in status, therefore depriving the worker of any sense of control of his life. They are also low-paying: going from a full-time job to a part-time one would mean experiencing, on average, a sixty-percent drop in hourly pay. Cutting one’s work-week in half, therefore, would mean plunging from affluence to utter poverty. In fact, those who have spent their lives in the ghetto of part-time employment often need to work simultaneously at two or three such jobs; the term “part time” then, of course, becomes rather meaningless.

At the end of The Story of My Heart, Richard Jefferies says, “Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean. . . .” When I was about eleven or twelve years old, living in New Hampshire, a man who owned a large marina offered me a summer job. I declined, but I later wondered what it would have been like to become a part of that world of yachts and sailing, to see life as a series of ocean voyages, of tall waves and distant islands.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is [email protected].

 


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