Because of both the isolated way Americans went at life removed from the rest of the world by two great oceans ‒ and because of America’s obvious success politically, economically and socially in the days of the early Cold War (the 1950s and early 1960s) ‒ it became quite natural to Americans to expect that the rising “Third World” of Asia, Africa and Latin America would want to imitate the American social example … now that these peoples were freed from the failed imperialism of their former European colonial masters.
There of course was some concern that these newly emerging Third-World nations might mistakenly take up the political-economic-social course of the Communist “East” ‒ which the Soviet Russians were aggressively promoting abroad. But we were certain that with a small amount of American assistance, these newly emerging nations would make the right choice and go “American.”
In fact, American President Kennedy had made this a priority as he took office in early 1961 … in setting up the Peace Corps, enlisting American youth as volunteers to go abroad to these Third World nations to present in the villages and towns the “American Way” as a wonderful assist in their own national development.
But things usually had an “interesting” outcome in pursuing this particular “go-the-American-way” strategy!
A story illustrating the point
I graduated from college in 1963 and went on to Washington, D.C. to take up graduate study at Georgetown University … and helped pay for living expense by working part-time (20 hours a week) at the Peace Corps Headquarters on K Street. Kennedy had recently been killed … but the Kennedy spirit was still very evident at this important Peace Corps command center (Kennedy-relative Sarge Shriver was still in charge at this point).
Interestingly, the Peace Corps was formed to “sell” the American way abroad in the heat of the very competitive Cold War. But actually, those that headed off to Asia, Africa or Latin America in Peace Corps service would come to make much of the same discovery I had made in Geneva. They would end up receiving as much social-cultural education from the societies they were assigned to … as the social-cultural education they were supposed to be selling to these same societies!
In fact, a very funny story spread quickly around Peace Corps headquarters in my early days there. It had been only recently that the first of the volunteers had completed their overseas assignments and had returned home to America to resume their lives (much changed by the experience, of course!). This story is about one of those returnees.
He had entered Peace Corps training right out of college (a typical humanities major), was taught the local dialect and some of the social ways of the Indian village he would be heading to … and how to raise chickens for commercial purposes! He was supposed to show his Indian hosts how to do commercial ventures the American way … that is, through a process of industrial capitalism rather than through older patterns of industrial socialism (which the Communist world was actively promoting).
And at the time of the completion of his two-year service there, it certainly appeared that his work had been most successful. He had been cautious in his introducing new social patterns to the village … taught to work slowly with the local elders in getting them onboard with his program. But little by little, he got the village to set up chicken coops to house the chicks sent by the Indian government to get the project up and running … the chicks in turn developing and then producing a fast-growing offspring. Thus by the end of his time in India, he and the villagers had put in place a rather large chicken farm … ready to get into the business of selling this vital product.
On his return to the States he went off to grad school … but with the memory of his time in India still much on his mind. At the end of a year back in America he decided that he simply had to return to India to see how his efforts had paid off for the villagers he had come to love so dearly. Thus he bought an air ticket to India … and let his friends there know of his plans to visit them.
The day came that he arrived back at the village … and the villagers poured out in huge numbers and in great enthusiasm to greet their wonderful American friend. The village had obviously set itself up for a grand celebration for his return. Banners here and there announced the matter clearly.
But as he passed the chicken coops … he was shocked to see them completely empty. He tried to hide the fact that he was greatly alarmed by the discovery. But finally he brought himself to ask … what happened to all the chickens?
“Oh Sahib,” they answered! “Your efforts here will always celebrated in great honor to you … because soon after your departure, our village was able to offer the surrounding villages a great chicken feast … one that grandly ennobled our village in the eyes of others. The honor we now possess will always be remembered to have come from your very hands. Isn’t that just awesome!”
And so it was … that the American effort, combined with the local social culture – which did not change much from that very effort – did have a great effect on the political landscape, at least for that village and its neighbors. And that was a very good thing … though not exactly as the planners back in D.C. expected things to develop! But that’s how life works.
And the village loved the young American … and he continued to love them – having learned to accept the way that they went at life differently. In fact, he may have been one of the Peace Corps returnees to enter deeply into the communal lifestyle that he brought back from his Peace Corps experience.
Johnson’s Vietnam crusade
President Johnson had decided that the best way to fight the scourge of Communism was to take a very firm stand against the spread of that Communism. Not to do so was to allow a “domino effect” to take place, where if one society were allowed to fall to Communist aggresssion, then the neighboring societies would find themselves subject to the same aggresssion, one neighbor falling after another … like a line of dominoes. Thus Johnson had used military draft service to send Boomer males to South Vietnam, where Johnson viewed the domino danger to be greatest.
Of course Johnson knew absolutely nothing about Vietnamese cuture (or actually “cultures”) and the impossibility of stopping a Communist “spread” by an American military strategy poorly-designed to deal with the actual political dynamic going on in that country. Most tragically, a lot of people, both Vietnamese and American military, got killed … to no great purpose.
But the Boomers change the game considerably
Tragically, the social group that followed the “Silents” to adulthood, the “Boomers,” were a very different breed. But that’s because they were the social by-product of the 1950s Cold War … not the 1940s World War Two.
Both the Silents and the Boomers were raised largely by the Vet generation. But something happened along the way to change the Vet approach to training their children for the world lying ahead of them. The Silents and the Boomers would be raised quite differently. And that’s because the world itself changed dramatically as the 1940s headed into the 1950s. And behind that change was the way that the Cold War developed.
At the end of World War Two in 1945, Old Europe was devastated … with Stalin’s Soviet Russia in military occupation of the eastern half of Europe – and most unwilling to go home. Russia had been constantly assaulted from the West … by Napoleon and his French troops in 1812, by the Germans and Austrians in 1914, and most recently by Hitler’s Nazi troops in 1941. The Stalin’s Russians fully intended, at all costs, to hold on to all this East European buffer territory that their troops occupied in order to protecting themseslves from another such assault from the West. Indeed, Stalin also intended to extend that Russian realm of protection if possible all the way to the Atlantic across Western Europe … through the militancy of the large Communist parties in the West, huge labor-based organizations (coupled with numerous “progressive” intellectuals) that were quite willing to place themselves under Stalin’s command.
At the same time, the Americans, who had just gone through this horrible war in Europe (and in the Pacific) were most insistent about going home at war’s end … though President Truman did everything possible to keep enough American power employed in the western half of Europe to keep it from falling into Stalin’s Soviet Russian expansionist hands. America was the sole country to possess an atomic bomb … and Truman’s well-demonstrated readiness to use that bomb if seriously challenged was a very effective deterrent to Soviet ambitions in the West. But Marshall Aid moneys in helping rebuild West Europe’s economies … and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 all seemed to stalemate the East-West conflict.
But by 1950 things seemed to be unsticking … stirring a deeper alarm back in America about the way the Cold War was developing. Several things that hit the American political scene at about the same time shook America deeply.
First was the claim of the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that a number of highly-placed (and also highly educated) civil servants had been offering their services as spies to Stalin. This revelation was shocking to loyal Vets. But to make matters worse, the American intellctual community tended to side with the accused against HUAC’s “horribly misguided” efforts to destroy these fine gentlemen (holding some of America’s highest academic and professional credentials). Particularly galling to them was the persistence of Congressman Richard Nixon in his efforts to uncover such spying in high places … putting Nixon forever on the intellectuals’ list of public enemies they were resolved to bring down at their earliest opportunity (it was too dangerous at the [1]moment to attempt this countering move).
Then there was the matter of the sudden and most unexpected attack of Communist North Korea on “democratic” South Korea (the latter having actually had UN-authorized elections to pick their leadership) in mid-1950. Truman was quick to move American troops in occupation in Japan to South Korea … and then call other Americans to service to drive the troops not only of a Communist North Korea out of the South … but also to fight off masses of troops of a newly Communist China that had joined the battle against American efforts to free Korea of this horrible scourge. This stiff opposition in Korea easily identified itseslf to Americans as a grand Communist example of the intent of Russia, its ally North Korea, and now also Communist China to destroy the world’s democracies. America was now fully awake and fully involved in a most vicious Cold War fought against expansionist Communism.
To make matters even tougher for Americans, the recent revelation that Soviet Russia was now also in possession of nuclear weapons (Americans thus no longer had a monopoly in the ownership of this most terrifying weapon) was shocking to the core. And most shocking was the revelation that some members of America’s own scientific community had actually helped in developing Soviet atomic capabiities.[2] This of course made them wonder how extensive this kind of treason extended through the ranks of America’s most respected intellectual community. Bit by bit political paranoia was setting in deeply witin Vet America.
Tragically, a politically slimy US Senator McCarthy exploited this paranoia fully to further his own flagging political importance … to the point that during the first half of the 1950s he seemed to have a very nervous America under his flambouyant political grip. He played his political hand by pushing the assumption that he alone knew the deep extent of the Communist intrustion into the higher ranks of American society … and he alone would bring such traitors to exposure and ultimate destruction. Very unfortunately, the Vets were willing to believe him … and support him, even if only from a cautious distance.
Actually, McCarthy had no such information, and made up what he could by way of details when challenged, although all the way up until 1954 no one was really willing to challenge him seriously … for he was able to make it appear that any such challenger was actually acting as a hated Communist agent. Even President Eisenhower refused to go after him.
The political-social-cultural effect of such Cold-War hysteria
Sadly, all of this political dynamic would come to have deeply damaging effect on America socially and culturally. Most obviously at this point it would cultivate a deep distrust and disrespect between intellectual America and Vet America … one that would never be healed. During the 1950s the bitter standoff would favor the Vets. But with the coming of the 1960s, intellectual America would be able to reassert its leading role in American society … and actually begin the undercutting of Vet America … or “Middle America” as I like to term that particular political culture. And it would always be done in the name of “progress” (or as Obama would eventually term it, simply “Change). The goal was to free up America from such American “fascism” as Vet America exemplified.
For instance, the play The Crucible, written by a very bitter playwight Arthur Miller[3] was a not-too-subtile attack on Vet or Middle America. … who dredged up an histiorical incident occuring in early colonial America (back in the 1690s) when “Christian” or Puritan America went on a crusade to rid the Massachusetts colony of numerous individuals accused of practicing witchcraft. It was a swing against the perceived cruelty of the anti-Communist hysteria of Miller’s own days … disguising its deep social commentary by focusing on the similar hysteria of this most-unfotunate event in early America.
Not surprisingly the play did not do well in the 1950s. But when the 1960s rolled around, the play was brought back out for performance … and was so well received by a fast-changing America that the play itself soon became required reading in nearly all American high school literature classes. It was a sign of how deeply political fortunes were changing as the 1950s moved into the 1960s.
But this change was pushed not only by intellectual America but also by a rising Boomer generation. And for this undercutting of the Vet Middle-American legecy by the Boomers, their Vet parents have only themselves to blame. Given the high level of anti-Communist hysteria found among a Vet generation that had fought the authoritarianism of German and Japanese Fascism in the 1940s and now found themselves facing that same authoritarian threat from a spreading Communism in the 1950s, it was hardly surprising that the Vets became increasingly concerned about the vulnerabilty of their own children in the face of this spreading (even, according to McCarthy, within America itself) authoritarianism. Thus it was as the 1950s developed, the Vets went on a very strong anti-authority campaign … teaching their children not to accepgt anything on the basis of having been put before them by someone in authority (even being cautious themselves to to avoid such authoritarianism at home). Instead, their children were taught to thing for themselves … and thus remain resistant to any form of authoritarianism.
Tragically, it never crossed the minds of these Vets that their children would have to come up with social standards to live by from some kind of source or other. Vets just assumed (most naiively) that social instincts arise simply by nature … for everyone they knew lived and moved under a fairly uniform (Middle American) social order. They did not realize that such uniformity had been shaped by the deep challenges Americans had faced since the onset of the Depression (when the Vets themselves were children and youth) and by the extreme social demands of slugging through World War Two … when everyone served, either in uniform or at home on the “Home Front.” The Vets had developed and served within the context of a highly disciplined social order.
Most unfortunately, in “freeing” their offspring from such social discipline (identifing it even as “authoritarianism”) they would be creating what would soon enough come to look to the Vets as young social monsters.
Now the Silents seemed to slide past this dramatic change in America’s social seslf-understanding, for the most part having grown up in the vitally important first years of social development prior to the arrival of the 1950s. But the Boomers, a bit younger, stepped into their world of social development just as this new “an authroitarian” spirit was setting in deeply in America. And thus they would take fully the heart to command to be “free” … to “do your own thing.”
They supposedly would allow themselves to come under noone else’s social order than the one that they shaped for themselves. But what the Boomers (and their Vet parents) did not realize was that they would develop their own sense of social order from somewhere … from somewhere else. And develop that social order they would indeed. Being “free” non-conformists, they would amazingly conform not to the social order of the American generations that had gone before them. They would conform to a social order of non-conformity itself, one designed and well-located among the Boomers themselves … one which they all conformed to extensively!
They took up a very distinct (“hippie”) attire and, music style (exemplified perfectly in the massive music gathering at Woodstock in 1969) as a critical social identifier.
But most of all, they felt compelled, as some kind of great social crusade, to stand in opposition to virtually everything politically, socially, and culturally, that their parents represented … the Vet social profile now identified as simply another form of fascism, a fascism that Boomers were now dedicated (by way of their most bizarre social development) to oppose on all fronts.
They were not interested in their parents strong social-cultural Christian inheritance. They did not see male-female roles as their parents did. In fact they did not have the family as the heart of American life … but instead their own personal professional development as life’s primary call. Thus church life began its unbroken decline, marriages failed, women eagerly displaced men in traditional roles of leadership, and in fact sexual behavior began to “come out” in all sorts of very non-traditional ways.
Contributing to this distancing of the Boomers from their parents’ Vet world was the Vietnam war. President Johnson had decided that the best way to fight the scourge of Communism was to take a very firm stand against the spread of that Communism. Not to do so was to allow a “domino effect” to take place, where if one society were allowed to fall to Communist aggresssion, then the neighboring societies would find themselves subject to the same aggresssion, one neighbor falling after another … like a line of dominoes. Thus Johnson had used military draft service to send Boomer males to South Vietnam, where Johnson viewed the domino danger to be greatest.
Of course Johnson knew absolutely nothing about Vietnamese cuture (or actually “cultures”) and the impossibility of stopping a Communist “spread” by an American military strategy poorly-designed to deal with the actual political dynamic going on in that country. Most tragically, a lot of people, both Vietnamese and American military, got killed … to no great purpose.
And very quickly this fact began to register itself among Boomer youth called to such national service (and eventually even with President Johnson himself), Boomers taking to the streets (especially on college campuses) to protest against such Fascism. There was no way they would bring themselves to bow to such authoritarianism … no matter how much Washington authorities and an older-generation America considered such patriotic national service a matter of great importance. Again, to the Boomer, this call to patriotism was simply a call to embrace authoritarian fascism.
But the Boomer generation and their revolt against “fascism” posing as patriotism did not stand alone. In this matter Boomers enjoyed the strong support of members of American intellectualdom (especially its younger members) who now saw the opportunity to swing things back against Vet social dominance. Colleges and universities, Boomer students joined by younger professors, thus became major scenes of this anti-war (or “anti-fascist”) protesting, American flag-burning, dynamic.
But so also did Hollywood … wbich began to undertake an assault on Middle America and all that it stood for. Thus the TV series “All in the Family,” (running from 1971 to 1979) mocked the White male/father Archie Bunker as being the most ridiculous of individuals … absolutely unable to get any kind of social-political thoughts right … especially concerning the issues running hot in the 1970s (sexism, racism, abortion, homosexualty, religion, etc.) The popularity of this program was a clear indicator of how far Bommer-intellectual or “post-Vet” social thought was taking over the position once held by earlier Vet-inspired pro-traditional family TV programming …such as “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” (running from 1952 to 1966).
The Vet programs had been quite humorous … but also very respectful of family roles. But this understanding of things was losing ground rapidlyl
But all was not lost. The TV program “Happy Days” fought back … portraying the earlier 1950s as indeed offering much happier days.
But time was running out for the Vets and their world. The maturing Boomers were entering positions of social importance all across America. And in doing so, they not only rejected any possibilities of returning to the well-tested American social order put in place by earlier generations, they would make sure that their Boomer social values (such as they had) were passed on to their very confused Gen-X offspring, a new generation to come onto the American scene … one that tried to grow up within the confused context of their parents’ (most frequently divorced or separated) Boomer world.
[1]It was not until 20 years after Nixon had been driven from his position as American president, with collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives in the early 1990s, that Nixon was proven to have been the one who was right all along on this matter of spies in the upper reaches of the American social-political order.
[2]A revelation also contested by members of America’s intellectual community … although again, years later, proven to have been true.
[3]He was outraged that a formerly close colleague of his would give in to the political pressures of the day and actually go public in offering the names of writers and playwrights with Communist connections or loyalties.