by Jack Cady
The man who wore that jacket now runs a business in a large city and spends most of his time fighting encroachment by government minions or the large gulp and screw of corporations. He does not like the world’s business or its music or its plans. He works too hard and his voice is quiet on times when it might be loud. Both of his daughters are living with freaks. One with a writer, the other with a potter. At fifty-seven that sort of thing can be hard to deal with. He probably tries not to think about it.
At fifty-seven, and as a representative member of a generation that has been excoriated as nazi, conservative, business jock and all-around bad guy by half the population now alive, it may also be that he sometimes wishes his kids had more understanding. Is an act of justice due? Is it wanted? If justice were done would it hurt? Maybe. He expresses few opinions on amnesty for others, expresses no opinions on amnesty for himself.
I write of a silver Ford Tri-motor and of a generation of revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are those who turn the established order upside down. I write of their success and of their failure. There has been time to ponder the history. Part of that history is my own, and, though the philosophy of history and society has produced plenty of foolishness, it is not a fool’s errand. This is especially true in a time when the xeroxed soul is the convention, and when the hero has been abandoned for the martyr because the society produces few heroes. It is true at a time when big chunks of the population are emotional survivors before age thirty.
In all my travels I saw very little real poverty, I mean the grinding terrifying poorness of the Thirties. That at least was real and tangible. No, it was a sickness, a kind of wasting disease. There were wishes but not wants. And underneath it all the building energy like gasses in a corpse.
—John Steinbeck, 1971
The contrast between these revolutionaries and their children can only be as angular and gawky as a stork. The generation of which I write did not know shit from shinola about ‘lifestyles,’ ‘chairpersons’ or ‘creation’ by committees. Few turtlenecks infested their closets. They were sometimes hep, never hip, and when their big bands swung they told each other to get hot, not cool.
They caused a revolution and raised a bunch of kids who during the ‘60s would engage in a reformation. Reformation has historically been purifying reform movement based not on radical ideas but on fundamentalism.
Time rolls, the generations pulse, pant, dream and make babies. My friend is twenty-eight, her father fifty seven. In twenty-five years she will be thought an old fogey and her old man and I will both be dead. We lived hard. Thank God you don’t have to take it with you.
He was born in 1920. That meant that he was too young to enjoy the fun. The cats were celebrating the invention of walls by climbing them in those days. They were the days of Fitzgerald and Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe. A world of red hot and enlightened boy scouts. Someday a professorial set of whiskers will flash on the similarity between Richard Nixon and Gatsby.
Eugene hemmed; hinted timidly at shagginess; confessed. They undid their buttons, smeared oily hands upon their bellies, and waited through rapturous days for the golden fleece.
“Hair makes a man of you,” said Harry.
—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel
At the time Henry Ford was the revolutionary. He did it at no inconsiderable profit to himself. Like most revolutionaries of both the 19th and 20th centuries his interests were economic and only secondarily political. As in all revolutions the results were social. Only in the emerging U.S.S.R. would there be revolutionaries who would post a record of political change to equal the social flip-flop that the industrial U.S. would make in this century.
In 1920 Ford had nearly every industry in the nation screaming. His assembly plants boomed. During the First World War he had announced the five-dollar day for employees. It forced industry to compete. Five dollars was an astonishing wage. It caused the kind of shock that took some time to wear off. Early labor leaders in the U.S. were as inept and fumbling before the fact as was the Communist Party in Russia after Kerensky but before Lenin.
The Model T sold more than half a million copies in 1916, two million in 1923, and the total run before the Model A appeared in ‘28 would be fifteen million. This in a nation of a hundred fifteen million (of which ten million were black and at the time not entitled to own anything but the blues). A nation that had yet to discover how to build a road that would work all year round.
Our hero (my friend’s father and not Henry Ford) was nine years old when the world died. We must call him hero since his generation knew nothing of protagonists. The Tri-motor was still a thing of the future. The stork was taking a Freudian beating. The life of the nation was as rumpled as a bird sprawled by a shotgun blast. Social patterns, sexual customs, economic beliefs and booze chanted new themes in tin pan alley jargon over the flaming truth of this brave new world. Flight, Oh, beautiful. We can fly.
And fly they did, and, oh God, it was a fabulous wreck.
We die of what we eat and drink. But more we die of what we think . . .
— E.A. Robinson, “Hector Kane”
I pause to consider sin. Billy Sunday has given way to Billy Graham. What this means is perhaps implied by the fact that no one in America has yet written a book entitled Fundamentalism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Graham chants dogma. He tells of the faith of our hero’s father, of which there is more to say.
Sin was not an abstraction in 1920, nor was it confined to theological disputation. It was not merely a scare word to evoke societal guilt. It was real. It was walking around out there with a forked tail, horns on its head, the Letter ‘A’ emblazoned across its brow and on its lips was the smile of the goat. Our hero’s parents were products of the Victorian era. They were provincial and that is what our hero learned. Geographic mobility for the majority had been limited to a range of no more than twenty miles from home. Thus, home was different.
Home was more important and more people lived there. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, shirt-tail cousins. The home involved community. It was community.
The Model T broke that community. It was possible to think in terms of a hundred miles, even a thousand. The quick rise of industry in World War One, together with European immigration, caused the cities to boom. From an agrarian society the U.S. rapidly moved toward an urban society. The country boys learned a lot when they got to town.
The first thing they learned is that in a city you can walk around a corner and become a stranger. This is one of the few keys it takes to open the lock of the 1920s.
All bets were off except for one. You may be a stranger to others, and you may behave like others, but your conscience is not a stranger to you. The rule of a Victorian morality weakened because the community was not there to enforce the rules. It only caught up in the late hours when the music had stopped.
It rarely stopped. Business was king. Money was not plentiful for all, but it was plentiful for many. Those who had none had the knowledge of the true believer that all it was going to take was a little time. Everyone would soon be rich.
The U.S. discovered education. It became important to finish high school. That assured success in business.
The educated, as well as the popular press, discovered Freud. Repressions were bad for you. A generation of ladies who had been raised with the expectation of meeting suitors in the home parlor, instead found themselves in roadhouses riding the whirl of illegal booze. Prohibition had struck. Yes, repression was bad for you . . . and God was back home with the old folks. Deaden that stylistically ridiculous conscience. By 1929 the situation was so tangled that it must have confused a nine-year-old.
Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
—Prof. Irving Fisher, Yale, 16 October 1929
A lot has been written. There have been more than enough sentimentalities bruited around about the good old days. Horror stories tinged with the schmaltz of sentimentality. In 1929 the economic crisis was more abrupt
and longer lasting than would be the political crisis of 1973. Similarities are easy to see. In each case a superficial system of unwarranted power went bankrupt. In each case the enlightened boy scouts took the test for eagle and laid ostrich eggs instead.
This is hardly sarcasm. In each case we see men who were given power, but who did not understand why they deserved it or even why they had it. That they misused power was unremarkable. That they misused it with the sincerity and locker-room morality of boy scouts is most fortunate. Lenin would not have made such a mistake. Neither would Andrew Carnegie or Leland Stanford.
In 1929, at the age of nine, our hero embarked on his revolutionary career. He did not know it at the time. That is one clear difference between a revolutionary and a saint.
Two economic facts have characterized all depressions of the past. There is no work. Of this particular depression there were other characteristics as grim. Let us consider them through the experience of one who saw them between ages nine and nineteen in the years 1929 through 1939.
The nation was in retreat. We read statistics on yellowing pages, read of cannibalism in Chicago, of starvation and millions dispossessed. All statistics. We do not read of the emotions that washed over the child, then over the young man. He will not tell you of them. He has most earnestly tried to forget them.
There was guilt, shame, hatred and fear.
In what was still a fundamentalist religious nation, guilt was exploited from the pulpit at a time when the people were confused and reaching for any explanation. Recall, also, that this was a people but newly removed from the authority of small communities. It is easy to understand the impact on the American mind by snarling and implacable preachers. Whether or not our hero cared two sticks for religion is unimportant. He lived in a shattered world that did. As late as 1939, when I was seven, I can recall a sermon in which the depression was explained as having been a vengeance of God upon the excesses and pride of the ‘20s.
Shame took its quiet shape, spoken in gestures, whispers, avoidance. In the American ethic, every man had always known that a good man could work and support his family. When that knowledge became a lie the men did not blame economics or government. They blamed themselves. Later, when the shame was too wearing, they sought scapegoats and masked the shame with hatred.
For the first years, fear was everywhere. Government made futile cries alternating between optimism and disgrace. Since no politician can admit error, the political persons acted then as political persons would act thirty-five years later on the withdrawal from Viet Nam . . . which is to say they all agreed that everyone had behaved splendidly, except, perhaps, the American people. The voters may have privately agreed, but they elected Franklin Roosevelt, as they would later elect Jimmy Carter. This is characteristic of American history. Whenever the nation has been armpit-deep in muck it has opted for change.
First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance . . . . Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
—F.D.R. Inaugural address, 1933
Roosevelt was, or was not, a great man. It depends on one’s political hates. Our hero does not love him. Roosevelt was greatly championed or greatly despised by those who remember his governments. Only the most bigoted, however, would deny that into the guilt, shame, hatred and fear, Roosevelt injected optimism and hope. He moved across history like he was on roller skates. Only the deliberately stupid could fail to see that he saved an industrial and economic system which would then curse him forever. It is a mixed bag. It seems most likely that the hope caused both guilt and shame to turn to hatred.
Our hero got a jolt of hate that was as scorching as a steel pour. Tin horn messiahs had been circling the action for years. By 1937 a hate campaign rose through the nation targeting the Jews, and, in lesser fashion, the Catholics and Negroes. The latter term is appropriate for the period. The agitators, of course, said nigger like always.
I recall one of those vocal tramps. In our high school auditorium in 1939 came forth a man of tales. Some were perverse even in the light of this PG-rated day. There were only two Jews in that town so the rap was about Catholics.
Most of it was conventional. When a Catholic boy was born another rifle was buried beneath the church. Some were grotesque, nuns having abortions using a Satanic technique of bathing in tubs of used menstrual cloths. Priests smearing sperm around confessional to help stimulate this peculiar race.
In the remembered instance the speaker was waylaid by a group of townspeople after the festivities. He received two broken arms. That rarely happened. Too often the people believed. Too often the rap was about the international cartel of Jews. Hitler’s support would not be only in Germany.
What is more, the people understood a new fear. In 1938 every man, woman and child knew there as going to be a war. The dogs and the cats knew it. The birds in the trees knew it. The only ones who did not know it were the politicians.
Our hero is eighteen. He is in a hell of a fix. The majority believed that we would soon be at war with Germany. A vocal and determined minority supported Hitler. In September, 1939, Hitler moved on Poland. In the barber shops, in beauty shops and at the soda fountain you could hear that it was a good thing. Roosevelt, the former N.R.A., and the Puritan ethic in combination would not produce wealth as quickly as would the God of the Germans leading His people to war. Stay out of the war but make it pay. Nearly everyone forgot the Japanese.
Now he is nineteen. He looks back on ten long years of hate, shame, guilt and fear. He understands without knowing exactly how, that the nation has been decimated by more than poverty. It has had a lesson in survival. As in all such lessons, many did not survive.
The point one remembers when some security-minded economist hitches up the pants of his two hundred-dollar suit and speaks of Malthus is this: starvation kills, but the dead feel no pain. The pain happens when you are alive. What was killed during the romantically remembered great depression in the U.S.A. circa 1929-39 was faith. Faith in institutions. Faith in every kind and variety of religion. Faith in government. Finally, faith in a man’s very self. Our hero’s generation was, and is, characterized by a fear of failure so profound that for many there will never be enough visible symbols of success, tangible goods, or grocery stores stocked with food to remove that fear this side of the grave.
Then war. The entire world opted for the death penalty.
There was a time, a personal time for Lockhart, which he knew as the time of the Burnt Man.
—Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea
To those who remember only the seedy and expensive conflicts of Korea and Viet Nam the Second World War is almost unimaginable. The world was saturated in blood. From Murmansk to South Africa, across the continent of Europe, through the middle east and the far east, at both poles, through the snarling waters of seven seas; through Russia and Alaska and Greenland and Australia the blood flowed like a curse to saturate the world. Combatants and non-combatants alike. Jews, Gypsies, workers on rubber plantations, the natives of islands . . . these were the incidental flow. So were the workers in factories. Jury-rigged machinery, death traps to keep the Victory E flying . . . a flag, naturally. It had its counterpart in every nation. The entire personnel loss of the U.S. in Nam was equal to the total loss for both sides of one battle for one island. Guadalcanal.
A hundred million deaths is a most conservative guess for the period 1941 through 1945. Our hero does not talk about it much. He talks about mules sometimes, but not where the mules went and the hulks they passed.
It is fair to say that scarcely a family was not struck by that war. If it was not an immediate member who was killed or wounded it was a man or woman from down the street. Community had not entirely vanished. During the depression it had even been rebuilt. Anyone who had a farm to go to had gone. At least on a farm you could eat.
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sp; The curse of hope had not vanished either. Often the telegram read, “Lost, somewhere in the Pacific.” People went to the globe or map, stared at the immensity of blue, knew hope not as a feathered thing but as enormous grief.
In the first day or two after the finish we still saw an occasional blanket-covered body lying at the roadside. Frequently we saw one or two German graves, where victims of vehicle strafing were buried. As we drove along our noses told us now and then of one that the burial parties had missed. (German retreat in northern Tunisia.)
—Ernie Pyle, Here is Your War
Then victory. Only the politicians and fools believed that. The people shouted not because the war was won, but because it was over and the majority was still alive. There were few pangs of conscience about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Conscience in that matter would be for later years. There was three days of shouting, then troubled murmurs in the streets. There was the spectre of Russia. There was the equal spectre of another depression that would destroy the prosperity brought by war. This was an experienced people.
Our hero returns. He has been starved and degraded for ten years, and he has feared his death for the next five. Behind him is a wrecked faith. He says to himself, and he says to others, that he has taken just all of the shit that he will ever again take in this life. The revolution has arrived. It is not economic, only. It is social. There is no hint of the boy scout. Later there will be, when dogma replaces faith.
Statistics do not pant, sweat, tumble on rumpled beds. They do not bleed. They do not dream. Statistics give measurable rates.
The birthrate rose like a scared cat going up a tall tree. So did the rates for divorce, insanity and suicide. The crime rate rose. It nearly equaled other rates. Those, more mundane, suggest an important story.