"Loss of the past is the supreme human tragedy," Simone Weil
once wrote about France. Nobody has ever said that about America:
Popular mythology holds that Americans are relentlessly.
determinedly, future-oriented. "We have it in our power to begin
the world all over again," proclaimed Thomas Paine, the
pamphleteer of the American Revolution. "The New Frontier" was
the slogan John F. Kennedy rode to victory in 1960.
But these days. many Americans seem gripped by a longing
not for a new frontier hut for the 'good old days." And these
sentiments are spurring calls for getting back an America that
once was. A promoter of this effort, conservative strategist
William S. Lind, even has a bumper-sticker slogan: "The Future We
Want Is To Be Found In Our Past."
Although backwaters of nostalgia have always existed in
merica as in every society, yearnings for the past are more
intense and more widespread than they were two decades ago.
Dangerous and tricky, but too tempting to avoid, these currents
are ripe for political exploitation.
Much of the rhetoric of the Campaign '96 race for the
White House is focused, subtly and not so subtly, on the
regaining of a Lost America, from Patrick J. Buchanan 'sexplicit
oal of making the United States "what it used to he," as he said
in a recent speech, to Robert Dole's representation of himself as
the embodiment of an older generation that, as he recently said,
"knows what made America great.''
For a growing share of Americans their country isn't as great as
it used to be. In 1974.54 per cent told Roper Starch Worldwide
Inc., a New York City polling firm, that the present was better
than the "good old days"; 38 per cent said they preferred the
"good old days"; 9 per cent said they didn't know.
In 1994, when Roper Starch asked the, identical question, the
numbers flipped 56 per cent said the "good old days" were
better; 32 per cent said the present was better; 12 per cent said
they didn't know.
But which "good old days."? Although cultural conservatives such
as Lind vie,
the family-friendly 1950s ifs the model for the future. there is
little evidence of a national consensus in favor of any one
period of time or even of any particular value from the past.
with the exception of such "gimmes" as safer streets.
Americans are dissatisfied with 1990s culture for varied reasons:
and what many long to recover is not some lost artifact of the
culture. such as the male-breadwinner family. hut the boom
economy of the postwar years.
The presidential candidates as well as many policy intellectuals,
widely bemoan the culturally permissive 1960s. At a National
Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 1, President Clinton rued how easy it
had become to act a divorce in America. But polls indicate that
many citizens. particularly young adults. regard the 1960s as the
good old days'--a freewheeling, innocent era. when the music was
fresh and AIDS unheard of
Yes, film adaptions of Jane Austen's early-19th-century novels of
genteel manners and mores arc the rage at the box office. But
before the restore-family values folks draw any great lessons
front that, they might also want to consider that in a new
outbreak of "Beatlemania." a recently released anthology album by
the Fab Four has sold more than three million copies.
Although conservatives uniformly line up in favor of the
restoration of what is popularly, and fuzzily, called "civil
society," for some this means the recovery of the seemingly safe-
and-secure 1950s and for others a return to the self-reliant Davy
Crockett days of the 1800s.
In a new poll of registered voters by Princeton Survey
Research Associates, 38 per cent said that the 1950s was the
best" decade in the past 70 years for American children to grow
up in--only 7 per cent said the 1990s and only 14 per cent the
1960s. But when they were asked which decade was the best for
Americans "of the age you are now," the results were much more
evenly spread; only 25 per cent chose the 1950s.
Perhaps the only thing on which the past-was-better crowd
can reach ready agreement is that the present ain't so good. This
sentiment is strikingly uniform: In the 1994 Roper Starch survey,
the "good old days" were preferred over the present by all age
groups, including baby boomers, as well as by men, women,
Democrats, Republicans, blacks, married people, single people,
parents, professionals and blue-collar workers.
Even blacks? Correct. The black community is awash in
nostalgia, as exemplified by the popularity of Louis A.
Farrakhan, whose talks repeatedly invoke the days of his
childhood in Boston's segregated Roxbury, when blacks patronized
their own businesses and ran their own schools. "Dressed in the
boxy double-breasted suits and arrow bow ties of the 1950s,"
Washington Post reporter Malcolm Gladwell wrote in a recent
profile, "Farrakhan has become the embodiment of a new and potent
black nostalgia."
Although a preference for the "good old days" was
greatest among the least wealthy Americans, even those in the
highest-income bracket in the 1994 Roper Starch survey-households
with annual incomes of $50,0000 and up--opted for the "good old
days" over the present by 50-42 per cent.
Seattle Mayor Norman B. Rice isn't surprised by the
polling data. "There clearly is a desire in this country to
return to a way of life that is different from the pressures of
urban and community living that exists today," Rice, a Democrat,
said in an interview.
Although critics view the new pastmindedness as a kind of
cultural disorientation or even malaise, Rice and others respond
that in a mature society, there's nothing wrong with trying to
undertake the work of restoration. America doesn't always need to
be reinventing itself--sometimes progress is one step backward.
"You can have a new promise constructed out of an old
model," said Chester E. Finn Jr., a Hudson Institute public
policy analyst who directed the think tank's project on "The New
Promise of American Life."
Rice aims to recreate "urban villages"--places where
Seattle residents can live, work, shop, play and go to school,
all within walking distance. Elsewhere in America, Alabama has
reintroduced chain gangs, public schools are reimposing dress
codes and New York City is once again arresting people for
'quality-of-life'' offenses, including loitering. In suburbia,
"co-housing" developments, architecturally designed to bring back
the days when neighbors frequently socialized, are growing in
popularity.
One of the hottest new books in political-idea circles is
*The Lost City*, *Governing* executive editor Alan Ehrenhalt's
poignant narrative on "discovering the forgotten virtues of
community" in 1950s Chicago. It may have been a world of "limited
choices," he writes, hut it was also a world of "lasting
relationships," in which people stayed married, and sports teams
and corporations didn't desert their communities. Although his
hook is not a cry for the restoration of the 1950s. Ehrenhalt
favors such "retro" steps to recreate community as limits on
school choice: He'd require parents with children in the public
school system to send their kids to the neighborhood school.
Just about all of the Lost America references in the
rhetoric of Campaign '96 are to a pre-1960s America. This may
reflect the political calculation that for those most likely to
show up in the voting booths, particularly the highly active
elderly, the longing is for the 1950s and even earlier periods.
Asked which period they perceived as the "good old days."
32 per cent of the age-60-and-over respondents to the 1994 Roper
Starch poll said the 1950s and 26 per cent said the 1940s. In
perhaps a measure of the unpopularity of the 1960s with this
cohort, the Depression Age 1930s got as many votes as the 1960s
(11 per cent) as the period of the "good old days."
When Buchanan, the most aggressively nostalgic of all of
the presidential candidates, talks about making the country "what
it used to be," he most definitely means the 1950s, when "we did
teach right from wrong," as he said on a recent visit to Los
Angeles. Republican presidential candidate Lamar Alexander talks
about a future in which "families work harder to stick together."
More than any other candidate, Malcolm S. (Steve) Forbes
Jr. has a consistently upbeat message that emphasizes America's
capacity for dynamic innovation. And yet, he wants to restore
"hope, growth and opportunity" in America by bringing back the
gold standard. His stump speech tries to comfort an anxious
citizenry by plucking a mystic chord of memory-after several
decades of Machine Age big government, big cities, big business
and big unions, he says, Computer Age America is returning the
country to its roots as a nation of self-reliant pioneers. "The
whole ethic, the whole dynamic, of this new age is profoundly
Jeffersonian in its individualism," he told a group of Iowa
college students on Feb. 6.
Not to he outflanked by the Republicans, Clinton is all
but calling upon America to undertake a cultural reclamation
project. He began his Jan. 23 State of the Union address by
reporting that the economy was strong, America's world leadership
was strong "and perhaps most important, we are gaining ground in
restoring our fundamental values." He went on to extol the old-
fashioned virtues of self-reliance and personal responsibility
and endorse school-uniform requirements. His speech was a page
from *It Takes a Village*--Hillary Rodham Clinton's new book on
the raising of children. In her book, she bemoans the
disappearance of the family meal--"a casualty of television, fast
food, microwaves and overtime"--and plugs sexual abstinence.
bedtime prayer, "authoritative" parenting, wholesome Hollywood
products and, yup, school uniforms.
Nobody will outbid Lind in this effort. An analyst at the
Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, a Washington
conservative advocacy group headed by Paul M. Weyrich, he's the
author of an unpublished manuscript called *Retroculture: Taking
America Back.* In Chapter 3, "Getting Started," he writes:
"Through memory and history. . . we can find out what people used
to do, and we can do those things again.... We can cook a
colonial dinner, build a new Victorian house, dance to big-band
music and live solid, moral respectable lives, because real
people did those things."
Maybe that sounds silly. But Lind's boss, Weyrich, has
long been one of cultural conservatism's savviest strategists.
Weyrich touts "retroculture"-which he defines as "an explicit
attempt to recapture and recreate the best from our past"-as his
movement's most marketable grass-roots rallying cry. "A past
focus offers what we most need," Weyrich declared in an essay
that the Hudson Institute published last year: "A theme broad
enough and powerful enough to serve as the basis of cultural
revival....retroculture enables us to offer a concrete rather
than an abstract vision of what America wants."
Weyrich views retroculture as a classic wedge issue ripe
for exploitation by conservative populists--"one that anti-
Establishment politicians could use to separate large numbers of
voters from the Establishment," he wrote in the essay.
"Clearly, within the Establishment, the concept of a past-focused
culture remains unimaginable, abhorrent, or both," he wrote. The
opposite is true with many voters."
Those findings don't surprise Gerald Early, director of
the African and Afro-American studies department at Washington
University in St. Louis. But he's no fan of the past-was-better
trend, and he's particularly dismayed to hear blacks praise the
days of pre-integration America. Such praise is widespread within
the black community, he readily acknowledged, from young students
as well as older people.
"It's a whole lot of romanticizing nonsense," Early said,
a Currier and Ives thing." Blacks "imagine we had had no crime,
no hardship.... This is all just fantasy. Why would people have
risked their lives in the civil rights movement'? There wasn't
any time when black life was better in the United States than it
is now."
Early attributed blacks nostalgia to "avoidance." "People
are disoriented and upset about the transitions in American life,
including integration.' he said. 'They don't know what to do
about the problems of black community,'' including the social
pathologies of inner-city slums. And, he added, there's no Martin
Luther King Jr. to give somebody some national vision for
integration.
Likewise, today's misty recalls of the 1950s omit the
red-baiting hysteria of McCarthyism, the terrors of living under
the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the fouling of air and water
by unregulated polluters and the limited jobs available to anyone
not a white male. The let-it-all-hang-out Sixties were a
reaction, probably inevitable, to the company-man conformism of
the 1950s.
But history is being bent by political partisans and
opinion-meisters with their own agendas. This is notably the case
in the outpouring of rosy accounts of the 1830s America
encountered by Alexis de Tocqueville, whose *Democracy in
America* is a bible in conservative quarters.
"Tocqueville's America was egalitarian, individualistic,
decentralized, religious, property-loving, lightly governed,"
journalists Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa both of whom are
sympathetic to the new libertarianism in American political
culture, write in their introduction to *The Almanac of American
Politics 1996,* published by National Journal Inc.
But the 1830s were also violent and anarchic--"property-
loving" Americans rioted in Baltimore when they lost their money
in a bank failure. (The militia was called out and killed 20
rioters.) And in "egalitarian" America, fresh water pumped from
the Schuylkill River bypassed the poor to go directly to the
homes of Philadelphia's wealthiest.
The "essence of the frontier", W.J. Cash wrote in his
classic *The Mind of the South* (1941), was "competition of a
particularly dismaying order," a "tooth-and-claw" struggle that
exposed the credulous and honest to fraudulent conveyances and
other features of "the elaborate machinery of ingenious chicane."
Social anomie was a defining feature of life in the
United States in the mid-19th century--"huddled together in their
loneliness," the historian David Donald wrote in his essay on "An
Excess of Democracy," Americans were putty in the hands of
agitators and extremists, a condition that helped make possible
the Civil War.
In an interview, Barone said that he viewed the 1830s
with sympathy but "not with unalloyed enthusiasm"--individualistic
countries "can fly apart," he said--and added that perhaps he
should have stated more explicitly "some of the downsides" of
Tocqueville's America.
But an imagined past can be an escapist balm. *Victoria*,
a glossy monthly launched by the Hearst Corp. in 1987, has
garnered a million-plus circulation with articles on "the well-
mannered courtship" of the 19th century and turn-of-the-century
teatime dances. The magazine is "a decompression chamber" for its
stressed-out readers, many of whom are college-educated married
women, deputy editor Daniel D'Arezzo said. "They like to spend
their time reading the magazine in a nice hot bath."
Nostalgia historically has coincided with periods of
cultural and economic transition. Today's wrenching shift from an
industrial to a postindustrial economy has a parallel in the
19th-century shift from an agricultural to a manufacturing
economy. Populist leaders, including William Jennings Bryan,
warned that the triumph of factory over farm endangered the very
soul of America.
Although Bryan failed in his three bids for the White
House, his message resonated well into the 20th century, fed by
the rapid advance of the city at the expense of the town. In *I'll
Take My Stand*, published in 1930, a band of southern writers led
by the "fugitive poets" of Vanderbilt University, called for a
revival of the Democratic Party on "agrarian, conservative, anti-
industrial" grounds.
The poet and historian Donald Grady Davidson wrote that
"in its very backwardness, the South had clung to some secret
which embodied, it seemed, the elements out of which its own
reconstruction--and possibly even the reconstruction of America--
might be achieved."
Trying to reassure nostalgic citizens, President Coolidge
donned a pair of overalls and had his picture taken as he
perched on the edge of a hay rig on a Vermont farm. In the
background, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, was Coolidge's
Pierce Arrow,' a secret service man on the running board, plainly
waiting to hurry the President away from his bogus labors."
In continental Europe, nostalgic appeals have fed the
worst kind of reactionary politics--Hitler rose to power by
marrying a criticism of the cultural decadence of the Weimar
republic with stirring paeans to the Nordic folk myths of Richard
Wagner's operas. "Only a horizon ringed about with myths can
unify a culture," a favorite philosopher of Hitler's, Friedrich
Nietzsche, once wrote. Hitler and Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini (to whom Hitler gave a copy of Nietzsche's collected
works) shared the belief that a culture's historic decline could
be reversed by a myth-propounding totalitarian state.
America's relative immunity to the mythic sirens of the
past has traditionally been viewed as one of its outstanding
advantages over the European Old World. In *The Promise of
American Life*, published in 1909, *New Republic* founder and
Progressive era theorist Herbert Croly argued that the essence of
tradition in America was a shared faith in a better future. "In
cherishing the promise of a better national future," Croly wrote,
"the American is fulfilling rather than imperiling the substance
of the national tradition." If Croly were alive today, perhaps he
would be dismayed to find America, while poised to enter the 21st
century as the globe's only true military and economic
superpower, so inclined to look backward.
Or maybe not. To those critics who say today's
pastmindedness is little more than misty-eyed nostalgia, a
yearning for a past that never was, *Governing's* Ehrenhalt, author
of *Lost City*, has a compelling reply. "Nostalgic illusion does
not explain the disappearance of lasting relationships between
merchant and customer in the commercial life of a neighborhood or
suburb," he wrote. "Nor does nostalgia account for the public
high schools where, in the 1950s, the principal passed out ropes
to boys who failed to wear belts each day, but where today the
most offensive displays of speech, dress and conduct are now
regarded as individual liberties and protected from discipline."
These represent losses, he said, "that it is altogether rational
to mourn."
Nor is it nostalgic, others add, to mourn the breakdown
of the nuclear family--after all, the share of single-parent
families rose from 12 per cent of all family households in
America in 1960 to 22 per cent in 1994. The divorce rate over
this period more than doubled, and the suicide rate more than
tripled. Starting with the Boston Braves' abrupt move to
Milwaukee in 1953, one professional sports team after another has
pulled out of communities that faithfully supported them.
And one needn't be a supporter of segregation to
recognize that the transition to integration has been wrenching
for the black community. In a new study of black classical
musicians in St. Louis from 1920-80, African-American cultural
historian Nancy L. Grant concluded that "exclusion from the white
musical establishment" had nurtured a vibrant black classical
music community. "Ironically, as the school desegregation plans
were implemented and the classical music organizations were
integrated, the black institutions that had sustained the black
community in providing a protest voice or a cultural identity
were abolished or weakened," Grant (who recently died) wrote in
an essay to be published in a volume edited by Early of
Washington University.
But even a modestly defined "restoration" isn't an easy
job. The re-creation of community may sound like an apple pie
goal, but public policy strategies for accomplishing it are
likely to inflame political passions and threaten entrenched
interests. Ehrenhalt's plea for mandatory neighborhood schools,
for example, is sure to meet with opposition from politically
powerful school-choice advocates. At a January dinner at the
White House, Ehrenhalt told Clinton that communities can't be
rebuilt without the reimposition of "authority" as a cardinal
value. He may be right, but a generation of baby boomers has been
culturally wired to question authority.
Buchanan wants to recapture the postwar days when a third
of America's workers had factory jobs, many of them paying enough
to support a single-breadwinner household. But these days,
manufacturing's share of the labor force has shrunk to 16 per
cent, partly because of foreign competition but mostly because
automation has enabled plants to produce more goods with fewer
workers. It would take, at a minimum, the reimposition of a high
tariff wall to check this trend-a step Buchanan has embraced but
for which widespread public support seems to be lacking.
And the viability of the "urban villages" envisioned by
Rice's master growth plan for his city, "Seattle 2010," depends
in part on much greater use of public transit-a shift that goes
against the grain of America's continuing love affair with the
automobile. Solo commuting in the car has flourished during the
past quarter-century despite strenuous efforts by urban planners
to discourage it. (For background, see *NATIONAL JOURNAL*, 1/20/96,
p. 114.)
The "restore America" folks aren't likely to make much
headway without a public consensus on which aspects of yesterday
ought to be restored. At the moment, that doesn't exist. Although
Lind stresses the importance of recapturing moral values, "moral
values" came in fifth in the list of things that respondents said
were better in the past in the Lawrence Research survey that his
foundation commissioned. "Employment, jobs" and "less crime,
safer" tied for first.
The second task, also not yet accomplished, is to
identify which aspects of yesterday are, in fact, restorable, and
lay out a strategy for getting there. Getting back the
neighborhood school is a piece of cake compared with, say,
recreating the nuclear family of Ozzie and Harriet.
Just as Americans say they long for a balanced budget but
resist cuts in particular programs, they also say they long for
the "good old days" but, so far at least, show little willingness
to make the sacrifices that would bring them back. Still,
temptations to dismiss the past-was-better crowd as nostalgia
bugs or to stigmatize them as dangerous reactionaries ought to be
resisted. America long ago lost its innocence, and needn't cling
to the anti-European mythology that progress lies only in an
uninterrupted wave of reinvention, a conquering of one new
frontier after another, from the Wild West to the solar system.
"I don't think there's a new frontier where people can run to
escape," Seattle's Rice said. "You've got to start working on
protecting what you've got."
-------------------------------------------
(c) 1996 by National Journal. Fair Use reprint for nonprofit
educational use is permitted.