Then And Now (2) - Getting Around

January 19, 2006
10:30 AM CST

(For Part 1 of this series, and for an explanation, go here.)

In 1954, most people lived lives of almost unbelievable insularity, even though 90% of adults had been on a train, and 40% had spent at least one night on a Pullman sleeper car.

People just didn’t travel. There was as yet no interstate highway system, and air travel, while becoming more popular, was something done by a relative few. Excluding farmers (still about 30% of the working population), most people worked two miles from their home, and it took an average of 18 minutes to get there (the average is quite high by modern standards, because not everyone drove to work: walking, and taking the bus, tramcar or train, was still quite common). Unsurprisingly, therefore, a full third of all working men would go home for lunch each day.

Fifteen percent of all adults had never been further than 250 miles from home (ie. a day’s drive, in those days); and despite the large coastal population and the many war veterans from both WWII and Korea, 25% of all adults had never seen the sea. Job relocation, and job change at all, was confined to a relative few.

Here’s the point of all these numbers. What all this immobility meant was that there was a much stronger sense of, and commitment to the community than exists today. (Bowling was the most popular leisure activity—outnumbering golf and table tennis, the next two most popular, by over three to one.)

It was also a time of conformity almost insufferable by today’s standards, and a lack of privacy was common. Doors were left unlocked, and women would “pop in” unannounced at any time of day. Neighbors who drew their curtains for privacy were thought to have something to hide, and considered “odd”.

To us, fifty years later, this would seem oppressive. But it should be remembered that this was a generation which had been through a World War together, and as a society had been drawn together by this event, for longer, than perhaps any other American generation before or since. (It may help to think how we as a nation came together in the weeks and months after 9/11, and then apply that single day’s events to a larger one lasting four years against a multitude of enemies.)

The conservatism applied to many other areas as well: 94% of people believed in God, and 69% were in favor of adding “under God” to the pledge of allegiance (which was done in the middle of 1954). The highest proportion of Bible readers (then and now) was in the South, and the lowest (then and now) in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. (I don’t want to think what has since become of California, which in 1954 was populated mostly by native Californians and transplanted Midwesterners, and is now populated by a multinational, multilingual and multicultural polyglot of Gomorrahns.)

As far as money was concerned, the people of 1954 still remembered the Depression: when asked what they would do with a $10,000 windfall, the average respondent would buy a house; if not in that group, most of the rest would pay off debt, bank the money, or invest it in securities (at a time when “securities” were still, ahem, a secure investment). Hardly anyone would blow it on travel or a similar frivolity. (That same generation today, of course, has little compunction in blowing a windfall because their Social Security benefits, increased during the Eisenhower administration, allow them to do just that.)

Because this was a prosperous time for the nation, men were able to keep their jobs, and could see themselves working for the same company for life—two years later, this lifestyle was examined pitilessly in The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit—but at the same time, there was a certain comfort in job security.

And yet, and yet… over 50% of all adults complained that they had trouble getting to sleep (sedatives were an unheard-of indulgence), and “money trouble” was given as the major cause of concern by a still-greater majority (peace and nuclear war were of concern to only 21%).

Here’s one telling statistic: the smallest amount of money on which a family of four could “get by on” was $240 per month, which seems ludicrous by today’s standards. However, in 1937 that number had been $120, and in 1917, $50. Older people remembered that, and it seems as though the mid-1950s was the first time that people felt that the cost of living was starting to “get away” from them, and keeping up was becoming more and more difficult for many.

If these feelings ring a bell for us today, and they should, the differences between then and now are so extreme that a huge number of today’s social ills become a little more understandable—albeit still inexcusable.

There is no job security today, none. There are all sorts of reasons for this: the old compact between employers and employees was absolutely shattered by the merger mania of the 1980s; travel became so common as to be unremarkable; and, to find a replacement job, people have been forced to look outside the neighborhoods of their childhood, usually several times in a working lifetime. (The “get by” amount, adjusted for inflation, is now $1,200 per month: five times what it was in 1954.)

[Personal note: I remember an ex-colleague being laid off in 1988, and on meeting him by chance a couple of years later, I was thunderstruck to find out that he had still not yet found a job. The reason was simple: he’d refused to leave his home town because his entire extended family was there. On hearing that, I confess that I had little sympathy for his predicament, because in our profession there was no shortage of jobs, provided that you were prepared to relocate. In fact, he never worked full-time again, instead going through a number of part-time jobs (conducting consumer interviews in malls and so on), and his wife found work as a secretary to help pay the bills, while he stayed at home with the kids. Nowadays, I’m not so sure that I’d be so dismissive of his attitude; he’s been married to the same woman for forty years, his kids have grown and left home (but not town), and a few years ago he moved to a small farm just outside his home town, where he spends most of his time reading, fishing, puttering in his workshop, and playing with his grandchildren. He’s sixty. I envy him greatly.]

What all this has done to our society is plain to see: rootlessness, few or no lasting community ties, family breakup, and an overwhelming sense of dread. Whereas the people of 1954 unanimously felt that they were better off than their parents and that their kids would be better off still, that sense of progress has come to a crashing halt today, where most people under the age of 25 feel that they will never live as well as their parents did.

Coupled with that is a fecklessness of the children of the 1950s, and of their surviving parents. When told in 2003 that Social Security was going to run out of money in 2027, a Congressman famously remarked, “So what? I’ll be dead by then.” (If I had my way, he’d be dead today.)

Yes, it’s easier to get around nowadays: air travel is ubiquitous, the interstate highway system covers the entire nation and reaches into almost every corner, and the Internet has made us, I think, a lot more worldly—or at least, has given us the opportunity to be so.

Frankly, I’m not so sure that it’s all been worth it.

For one group, though, there has been in incredible improvement; and I’ll be examining that phenomenon in the next essay.