That was also a towering generation.
For some reason or other, I was particularly struck at a young age by political and otherwise public matters. I remember the day FDR died, which is when I was four. We were visiting relatives and heard it on the radio and my parents were very distressed even though they were not particularly political. My mother thought about the fate of Jews but did not remember when I asked her years later of walking with me down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. For his part, my father just insisted that all rich people were crooks, getting their ill gotten gains, even George Washington. I have other early memories during and after the War ended. (I still think of the Second World War as “the War” whatever were the wars that came afterwards.) I remember blackouts. My parents put in a night light near my bed because it was so dark when the drapes and curtains were drawn. Men complained about how little gas was allocated through their ration categories but my father always seemed to get enough gas to travel between the Bronx and his father’s house in the Catskills. The three of us were able to take a trip to Akron, Ohio so the family could work in a bakery owned by the rich uncle who had brought my mother and her sister to America. The women in the extended family worked at the front selling baked goods while the men in the back made the baked goods, the kids just getting out of the way because the multiple families were so busy. Maybe Uncle Benjamin had gotten a lot of flour on the Black Market. The store was always filled with customers. Back in the Bronx, there was plenty of meat available in the local kosher meat market, and women would bring their ration stamps to be given to the butcher along with the cash. People were not hungry and rationing quickly ended after the War ended even though rationing in Great Britain didn’t end until the Fifties.
I remember the sunny day of V-J Day, the day when the war over Japan ended. We were in Woodridge, a village in the Catskills, and everyone was jubilant, no one thinking the A-bombs a mistake. That evening my mother took me with her down to the village that centered around a plaza near where the train station was that took trains from New Jersey through and beyond the Catskills. There was a gigantic bonfire and the young women danced a hora encircling the bonfire. I was four years old.
I remember “the boys” as everyone called them, coming home after the War ended. My mother was one of those who rented a community room to have a celebration for the veterans having made it through, some of them becoming doctors through the use of the G. I. Bill of Rights, no longer satisfied, any more than Dana Andrews in “The Best Years of Our Lives”, to go back to being soda jerks. A vet who I think now was a pre-med took charge of an accident scene, keeping the child safe until the ambulance came.. But some of the veterans had a long time adjusting. Some would still wear khaki shirts or pants for months, maybe saying the clothes were comfortable but even me, at five, thinking it odd that they would not change to civilian clothes as soon as possible. They got their discharge payments for months until they ran out and had to get work. And within a few years, we were looking inside the windows of bars so as to see the now available television sets and, soon enough, visiting neighbors who did have sets putting up chairs in their living rooms so people could visit for an evening and see what it was. I never could figure out whether tv owners were being gracious or just showing off and probably it was both.
I remember getting a television set in my own home in 1950 and thought it a revelation, and not just to see Milton Berle or “Howdy Doody”, where Buffalo Bob Smith introduced the enchanting Princess Summerfallwinterspring and Clarabel the clown and also Mr. Bluster, who was just that and every child in the Peanut Gallery could get that, onto his tricks, and I still wonder why there are today adults who cannot recognize similar miscreants. There were also more serious programs. There was John Cameron Swayze’s evening news program, the “Camel News Caravan'', though it was only fifteen minutes long. There were travelogs about veterans touring Europe and Japan, both the ravages and the recoveries; also, midday advisors of cosmetic care asked whether they should cover up the tattoo numbers placed on them in the concentration camps; there was “Victory at Sea'', the multi episode documentary on the Second World War, just as Life Magazine had volumes of wartime photographs that were published as coffee table books and obtained by families that did not read very much. Ten years later, Newton Minow decried “the vast wasteland” of American television, it being addressed to the level of a ten year old, but I was ten in 1951 and so there was a lot for me to absorb.
My first subscription, even before the one on science fiction novels that included Isaac Asimov, was Dorothy’ Schiff’s New York Post, a newspaper whose opinion writers included Max Lerner, the young Murray Kempton and Barry Grey, who covered entertainment and the mob and also, for a while, Jackie Robinson when he retired from baseball. The newspaper was decidedly Liberal and had a bit of a tabloid flash. It covered murders and rapes and so I had to explain to a younger female cousin what a rape was. Ther Post also covered developments concerning Anti-communism. It had headlines about the spy Judith Copeland and McCarthy’s question of who promoted Peress, who was a dentist working at Fort Dix, an army base near New York City, who in the usual course of things was promoted to Major and McCarthy wondered why that happened given that Peress’ family were Communists. The Post also covered the execution of Ethel Rosenberg in the electric charity at Sing Sing and revealed that her hair had sizzled blue when the execution occurred. It was only almost a decade later that I caught up with the Partisan Review article by Leslie Fiedler that summed up Ethel Rlosenberg best by saying that she never wavered from her party line as the dutiful wife innocent of all crimes and the trial a carriage of injustice, just as, in later biographies, I learned that Alger Hiss never stopped lying.
Despite McCarthyism, the achievements of the postwar American world, both domestic andforeign, were remarkable. America launched the working class into the middle class because unions got bigger pay because industry was so successful that it was cheaper to give pay hikes rather than stop production. The GI Bill of Rights made the working class vets into middle class employees. Federal housing support allowed people to buy single family homes in the newly expanded suburbs, Long Island potato farms transformed into housing tracts of cookie cutter houses indistinguishable from one another, each with a tree that was not shading because it had been so recently planted. Previously, George Bernard Shaw imagined in “Major Barbara”, in 1905, that good working class housing would be situated in urban centers close to their factories, as had the Bauhaus designers who built modern houses inside Tel Aviv, but the Americans thought of spreading out, even if Wilkie Collins in his 1879 novel “My Lady’s Money” described rows of small cottage homes next to one another in newly developed areas, complete with numbered addresses. But it was after the War that developments sprouted all over the country far away potato fields rather than merely the linear extension of urban areas as had happened around Paris in the later decades of the Nineteenth Century. The highways came later with the Interstate highway system, the road along Sunrise Highway until then crowded with the daily commute and the amenities of Chinese restaurants just taking root.
My neighborhood in the Central Bronx around Crotona Park was near Bathgate Avenue which was in the post-War years a busy shopping street with a store selling live chickens and a fancy bakery and multiple fruit stands and a pickle stand. I could get one for three cents. It was close by to Tremont Avenue that had fancy stationery stores, multiple movies, restaurants, hat shops for men and men’s haberdasheries.The bustling neighborhood didn’t disappear because the Cross Bronx Expressway was built. People were leaving anyway. The children of this working class neighborhood were on the way up. The next generation moved to Westchester or Long Island never to return and were replaced by Blacks and Hispanics and during the transition the Central bronx burnt down, apparently so the landlords coil;d get their money through fire insurance or maybe because the new tenants were unreliable and the buildings became firetraps. When the area settled down,Tremont became a lower class place with no haberdashery stores and no movies, a cultural wasteland common in urban poor neighborhoods. But there was no more when a building near Yankee Stadium was afire and was broadcast to the country
The Europeans caught up when they redeveloped their postwar economies thanks to the wisdom of post-War foreign policy unexpected given how the diplomats messed up the post world war I reconstruction so that there was no effective league of nations and american neglect and German reparations t6hat allowed germany to rise again as a hostile power just 12 years after the end of the Versailles Conference. Instead, the Marshall Plan in 1948 sustained Europe so it wouldn’t collapse into Communism and denazification and demilitarization allowed for Germany and Japan to become democratic nations allied with the United States within a generation of the end of the War. Even the relative success of the post Cold War world required border wars to resolve the demarcations of the divide between Europe and Russia. There was war to deal with the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the nineties and there still remains where to divide Ukraine from its Russian and Ukrainian area
The post-War era also had a distinctive cultural point of view despite its politics being front and center.. I have noted in a previous post that in the Thirties men were stolid and reliable while women could be a number of things. During the war years, men were courageous and women were expected to be of the right type, which meant supporting the wounded soldiers coming home from war. In the post War world, both men and women were concerned with personal integrity. The underappreciated “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” shows a veteran and his wife recently removed to the suburbs more concerned with family and doing the right things rather than ambition. The image presented in David Riesman's ”The Lonely Crowd” is people all having a gyroscope so that each of them can follow their own individual paths, neither dread conformists or equally dread deviants, each one winding up to be the same thing, just like Eisenhoiwer saying everybody could go to the church of their own choosing. The so-called Silent Generation, now freed from totalitarianism, a topic much discussed at the time, was free to pursue family lives of “togetherness”, extremes delegated to film noir and metaphysical rebellion as in “A Rebel Without a Cause”. It would be the next generation, that of the Sixties, that rekindled rebellion in politics and experimental style of life.
The post War ended long before the burning of the cities. It happened in the resurgence of Europe and Japan so that French, British, Italian and Japanese cars produced in newly created factories were able to compete with American decades old factories. That led to the Rust Belt and a sense that Japan would overcome America, a prophecy mistaken in that the United States invented the iphone and the computer and that America was able to produce more steel than it ever had though with just fewer workers. The Cold War era did not so much follow the post world war era but overlapped it, it beginning,as you might put it, with the development of an A-Bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949 or else Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946 at Fulton, Missouri with Truman in attendance or maybe when Marshall decided in 1947 that it was no longer any use to try to negotiate with the Chinese Communists The public attention on apocalyptic dread was present in early Fifties American movies even as the Japanese were reliving the A-Bombs with monster disaster movies. But remember that post War America, despite its preference for personal life, also accomplished civil rights with Truman integrating the armed forces, Jackie Robinson breaking into white baseball, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and eventually culminating in the mid-Sixties with the Voting Rights Bill and the Equal Accommodations Act. The generation after the Great Generation that won the War accomplished that and I was proud to be part of it.