Paradise Lost
It was during these idyllic days of childhood during the Great Depression and World War II that I learned most of the skills I’ve needed to survive. I assumed those days would go on forever. I was wrong.
My paradise was a child’s fantasy. Beneath the need to work together to win the war, deep divisions split the country. Even as a child I knew my father was the only executive at International General Electric who voted for Roosevelt. But for a brief time after the war a wave of optimism swept across America.
People’s lives had been on hold during four years of war. Pent up energy exploded. Returning GI’s took advantage of government programs encouraging education and housing. We built super-highways and an air transportation infrastructure. We converted the world’s biggest industrial war machine into a consumer powerhouse.
The whole country was on the move. “The cotton pickers and the secretaries might speak of the “New Deal;” the professors and writers were inclined to talk of “liberalism.” Whatever the term, the groups joined in a zest for legislation in favor of lower-income groups, for questioning and nose thumbing, for chopping away at the crust of social caste.”[i]
My father left International GE in 1946, a victim of a corporate power struggle and began three years of wandering, as he searched for a place to live and a way to make a living as his own boss. My brother had graduated from Harvard and my sister was safely off at Wellesley, so it may have seemed to my parents like a good time to break up the orderly flow of our life.
My parents auctioned off our possessions in a heartbreaking lawn sale, where treasured possessions and family heirlooms went for pennies, and packed up enough clothes to keep us going for a few months. They closed and locked the house for the last time, backed out the gravel driveway past the towering pine tree, out onto the macadam road where Mayberry bushes concealed one of my many hiding places and drove down Rosendale Road for the last time, the old farmhouse disappearing out the back window as we turned the corner past the apple orchard. I was 11 years old and I have never cried so hard again.
In these tumultuous times, it is a common human experience to be torn from a nurturing culture and thrown into a competitive one, to be forced to give up the traditional for the modern. In my child’s mind, the great depression and the war years were a time of social harmony, shared purpose and hope. I assumed those days would last forever. They did not. How do we survive these wrenching changes? I was about to find out. By the end of the summer, I was plunged into one of America’s first suburbs in Westport, Connecticut.
[i] Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade – and After: America 1945 – 1960, Vintage books
Notes in a Bottle
I understand these writings are only notes in a bottle cast onto an Internet. They may come to rest on a deserted coastline and never be seen by anyone. They may sink to the bottom. Or they may help someone understand a little better what happened to America during the crucial post World War II years.
Much already has been written about this time and more appears every day. Recently, and all highly recommended, are Jefferson Cowie‘s Staying Alive, which documents the collapse of the labor movement in the 1970s. Kevin Kruses‘ One Nation Under God shows how big business financed America’s post World War II religious revival as a way to reverse the New Deal. Karen Paget’s Patriotic Betrayal details the story of the CIA’s control of the National Student Association. Eleanor Agnew’s Back from the Land: How Young Americans went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back is a thoughtful look at the back to land movement.
Dramatic first-person accounts by people who struggled through these times are also common. So why add to all this chatter? Most of the personal accounts are written by boomers, the generation born after World War II. I have a different perspective.
I am part of the Silent Generation, people born between the mid 1920s to the mid 1940s. We are a comparatively small group, growing up during the great depression and a world war that killed 70 million people. We never produced a president. We produced few national leaders of any kind and most of those were outside the mainstream Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Andy Warhol, Tom Lehrer, Mort Sahl and the Beat poets.
The generation that fought World War II simply wouldn’t let go of power. The youngest of them, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush, were born in 1924 and Bush was president until 1992. Almost fifty years after the war! Bill Clinton came next, a boomer who was born in 1946. My generation didn’t make the cut. Bernie Sanders got close in the 2020 election, but he was too extreme for the Democratic Party.
The Nation Magazine in 1957 called us The Careful Young Men. That’s what the frightening Depression, horrific World War II and hysterical anti-Communist Crusade after the war taught us: be extremely careful!
I am entrenched in that past, but I am lucky. I also experienced the first sparks of rebellion in the Beat poets, sick comedians and folk music revival (the last stand for Communist idealism!) in the 1950s. I am grounded in that history. I learned to howl in protest with Beat poets, laugh at authority with sick comedians and embrace the principles of universal brotherhood with folk singers.
Boomers, for all their enthusiasm, had little interest in the past and believed they were creating a new world from the ground up. The old left was washed up. A New Left would rise and take its place, but without historical roots the New Left was bound to fail.
New Kid In Town
I celebrated my eleventh birthday in a seedy motel cabin set in a stand of bleak, scrubby pines in the New Jersey barrens. The ground was hard packed, flaking clay. Small one or two room cabins surrounded by dry and dusty driveways. My father was in the city looking for work and there was nothing for my mother and me to do except listen to the radio or read through stacks of comic books, as if bed ridden, recovering from an illness. I had belonged on Rosendale Road. I was alien in New Jersey. In one short trip I had gone from simply “being” to wondering who I was.
My father found work at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, and he tried to become “the man in the grey flannel man,” a movie about unhappy commuters. Before school started that Fall, we relocated to a small suburban home in Westport Connecticut, set on tiny, manicured lawn. It seemed a miserable, shrunken life compared to my free roaming on Rosendale Road.
At school the first week I was the “new kid in town,” an object of fixation by the entire class, on whom each student projected a fantasies of the perfect friend, a phase that was inevitably followed by the group’s rejection when the “new kid” turns out to be as unexceptional as everyone else, only different.
The kids in suburban Westport were certainly different from my friends on Rosendale Road. I had played with Franklin Kraft who barely spoke English and came from an upper-class German family and with poor kids down the road who I couldn’t bring home. We met and played together as members of different tribes. We didn’t try to be the same as each other. We knew who we were. We didn’t need to conform.
But in Westport, none of the kids seemed to be sure who they were or had any idea who they might become. They were bonded together only by a common need to be like each other.
Our fathers made the long commute to New York City from small suburban railroad stations, leaving early and coming home late. We lived with our mothers in neat houses smelling of floor polish with tiny yards scented with roses. There was no place to explore, to dig in the dirt, follow a trail, chase a phantom. Instead, afternoons were filled with structured, controlled times … piano lessons, dancing lessons and the boy scouts. Suburban kids were supervised and there was no place to run away. Boys hardly saw their dads and moms seemed disconnected to any world beyond their home.
I Become a Reader
In the spring of 1947, as I was riding home from school, I developed severe stomach pains. I told my mother I wanted to lie down, an unheard of proposal before that moment. Frightened by the deep concern on my mother’s face, I minimized the pain. Several things conspired to delay treatment: our old doctor in Schenectady thought the body best healed itself and advised my mother over the telephone to wait; we were between health plans and facing an uncertain future, with the memory of the depression still vivid, and avoiding unnecessary hospital costs was not frivolous; my father was out of town, looking for a new job in Rome, New York; my new Connecticut doctor was on an island in Long Island Sound without phone service, taking care of the Lindberg children. It took three days before I was rushed to an emergency room and treated for acute appendicitis and later a secondary infection called peritonitis that required additional surgery.
I’ve respected pain ever since. I can still recall the cool drip of ether down my cheek as the pain ebbed away. Later I awoke in the children’s burn ward to the unthinkable misery of children moaning in their beds and the smell of burnt flesh. Every morning the nurses woke the children early and made them sing, “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag, and smile, boys, smile.” It seemed cruel and unusual punishment.
With a secondary infection raging inside of me, I slipped in and out of consciousness, waking to the intolerable singing, nauseated by the awful smell, closing my eyes to the macabre upbeat mood of the nurses, resisting being propped up for meals, which consisted of stale food in dried puddles of sauce on chipped white plates, delivered on battered metal trays. Everything was in keeping with the barracks like atmosphere of the children’s burn ward of the Bridgeport Hospital in 1947.
I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t stay awake. A week later, surgeons performed a second operation and my parents moved me into a private room. Green walls, white gauze curtains blowing in a breeze coming through an open window, a metal bed with a real mattress and soft sheets. My mother brought me a package of frozen raspberries, the first food I could eat in a week. I began to rally but it would be another ten days before I left the hospital and six months before I was allowed physical exercise.
The hours wore heavily. I watched the second hand on the clock in my hospital room, tired of the radio and comic books. I begged my mother to read to me, as she had in childhood. The next day she read the first chapter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Treasure Island and left the book on the table next to the bed when she went home for the night. I picked it up and started the next chapter. I didn’t put Treasure Island down until Jim Hawkins was home safe and sound, the pounding sea still a nightmare on sleepless nights.
I was in bed for six weeks and out of play for six months. My fledgling attempts to learn baseball, football and basketball after eleven years in the country woods, ended forever. Reading became a lifetime habit. I still carry a book or a Kindle with me wherever I go to pass the time in bank lines and long stoplights.
I discovered reading when I was adrift in a world of suburban restrictions, aware for the first time that I actually would have to become someone, that simply being a boy was no longer enough. How could I not help but identify with young heroes like Jim Hawkins, living in the Admiral Benbow on the coast road to Bristol, befriending Captain Billy Bones and losing his father before the end of chapter two?
I went on to CS Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series and then to Zane Grey’s western novels. Reading showed me alternative worlds as compelling as those of my childhood fantasies. People raised on television may never experience the intensity of childhood reading in a world not yet saturated with moving images. Movies and television can be mesmerizing and I can forget entirely where I am or what I’m doing. But reading as a child, imagining the fullness of characters created in my mind simply by words on a piece of paper, was an act of imagination that forced me to take part in the story telling … filling in my own details from the writer’s clues. I’ve re-read many of these books later in life, and the stories they tell are different each time.
Reading reinforced my idealized view of life. The heroes of these Westerns were decent people, frequently in contrast to the mob around them. Jane Withersteen, a Mormon woman forced to choose between her church and her love, “worked for the welfare and happiness of those among whom she lived, Mormon and Gentile alike.”[i]
[i] Zane Grey, The Riders of the Purple Sage, p. 115)
The 1948 Election
My parents moved again in the summer of 1948 to Rome, New York, where my father became vice president of a company that manufactured an off-brand floor-polishing machine. Deep into adolescence, I faced another group of close-knit, small-town kids without the bonding skills of team sports to help. I made a few friends that fall when at Halloween I joined a group of kids spreading dried leaves across a residential street. I hadn’t realized what was coming next, until they poured on gasoline siphoned from a parked car and set the leaves on fire after which we ran like hell.
That winter at the skating pond down our street I played ice hockey in the afternoon with those boys until it got too late to see the puck. For a time I was flying high. My father was a vice president and talked about joining the country club and buying a sailboat.
The desire to “lose yourself in a book” implies some dissatisfaction with the world in which you find yourself. By the age of thirteen, that world was becoming larger for me. In my family, at least, it was impossible to ignore the 1948 presidential election. President Harry Truman, an under-dog spunky enough to have vetoed sixty-one Republican bills, as my father liked to point out, was a staple of the movie trailers I saw each week and the radio news my father insisted I share with him.
My parents supported Truman, but the President was under attack not only from New York’s Republican governor Tomas E. Dewey, but also from the left wing of his own party. Henry Wallace, a former cabinet member and vice president under FDR, was running against Truman on the Independent Progressive Party ticket. From the right, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond was running on a "Dixiecrat" ticket. Southern Democrats were angry at Truman’s support for stronger civil rights legislation. The Progressive Party wanted to push forward the New Deal and reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union.
Republican candidate Thomas Dewey projected a patrician image (my father said he looked like the picture-perfect groom on a wedding cake). He seemed so confident in victory that he took the high road in campaigning. All the pundits assumed Dewey would become the next president. Other Republican stalwarts were circulating a nasty song about Truman’s daughter, Mary Margaret, which was played or sung often enough for it still to be engraved in my memory.
Mary Margaret Truman is the daughter of the Pres
She lives in the White House with her pa and mama Bess
Her social rating is not worth debating
She is a member of Phi Beta Phi
When Harry S. Truman gets the gate in ’48
Repulsive Mary Margaret will be left without a date
She’ll go to Missouri and work in a brewery
So let’s drink milk.
My parents, their friends, teachers in school, everyone seemed on edge. It had been a difficult year. Newsreels in the winter of 1947 showed scenes of hunger, cold and misery in Europe that were worse than those during the war. “Think of the starving children of Europe,” mother reminded me at dinner when I didn’t want to eat my peas. Americans started worrying about Communists. They were already the largest political party in Italy.
The good feelings Americans had for their wartime ally, the Soviet Union, were gone. In February of 1948, Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia and on April Fools Day they blockaded Berlin. It was the beginning of a bloody year in which India’s great pacifist leader, Mahatma Gandhi was killed (at the end of January) and the first Arab Israeli War broke out in May after Israel announced its statehood.
At home, Americans were increasingly worried about domestic communists. Although we had one of the smallest Communist Parties in the world, many Americans thought that if war broke out with the Soviet Union, American Communists would be a fifth column that could do us harm. We had put the Japanese in camps during World War II and some of those camps were now being quietly rehabilitated for American Communists.
Then there was the bomb. In those early years of the atomic age, the bomb was a thing of awe and terror. We had seen what it did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Americans viewed our atomic future with trepidation. Although the United States had a monopoly on the bomb in 1948, nobody thought that our monopoly would last for long.
“A cold fear is gripping people … It’s not fear of Russia alone. For most people think we could rub Joe’s nose in the dirt. It’s not fear of Communism in this country. Few think there are enough commies here to put it over. It’s not fear of the atom bomb, for most think we still have a monopoly. But it does seem to be a reluctant conviction that these three relentless forces are prowling the earth and that somehow they are bound to mean trouble for us.”[i]
My parents supported Truman’s Marshall plan that provided funds to rebuild Western Europe as a bulwark against communist expansion. In the summer of 1948 everyone was thrilled to see the dramatic pictures of American cargo planes, silhouetted against a gray, Berlin sky, defying the Soviet blockade to bring food, clothing and coal to the people of West Berlin.
Truman was tougher than the Republicans thought: he reinstated the military draft, cracked down on domestic communists in government, and required government workers to take a loyalty oath for the first time in American history.
On election eve pollsters and punsters predicted a Republican win. The New York Times ran a headline: “Thomas E. Dewey’s Election as President is a Foregone Conclusion.” Life Magazine ran Dewey's picture on the cover with the caption, “The Next President of the United States." We sat around the radio as the results came in, listening to the prominent broadcaster H.V. Kaltenborn announcing that the President's early lead would be unlikely to hold.
My parents were thrilled when Truman won. It seemed to them to be a real victory for the little guy. They believed Truman expressed a common sentiment when he assured Americans in his inaugural speech on January 6th of 1949, that “Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.”[ii] These commonsense ideals represented Main Street thinking in the early post war years. We were a nation committed to the common good, to the essential principle behind wartime rationing, scrap drives and victory gardens … that we were all in this together.
[i] Historian Eric Goldman found a description of the mood in a Chicago newspaper.
[ii] Goldman p. 94.