This Fabulous Half-Century
Composed 1 January, 2011
Let me for a moment travel back in time. The 1970s, to be specific. I have only the vaguest memories of that time, as those were my earliest years. This little stroll down memory lane was triggered by one of mom's projects: she is putting her house up for sale, planning to move to a smaller one. As she gets older, the upkeep of a house gets more difficult, and a smaller place will be more manageable. As part of her downsizing, mom asked us to go through her books and pick out the ones we want. She still has many from the 70s and even before – even some that her mother and grandmother had owned. I
found the individual photo albums she had made for each of us; leafing
through mine, I saw pictures of me as a preschooler and early school-age,
with bookshelves in the background. On those bookshelves were many of
the same books I was at that very moment still seeing on her shelves.
Among those books that I remember having always been there was a series
of volumes titled This Fabulous Century. The title referred, of
course, to the 20th century; but since they were published in the 1970s,
they obviously could not cover the entire 20th century, so they just
extended back into the 19th century far enough to make up the full
hundred years. Volume one covered three decades, 1870-1900, and each
subsequent volume covered a single decade.
At one time, I toyed with the idea of reading the series. But in the
end, I decided that I really only cared to read the last volume,
1960-1970. This is due to the selectivity of my interest in American
history: I am interested in the history up to and including the American
Revolution, and the history from 1960 onward. I feel that, shortly after
the Revolution was completed, America lost its vision of itself, got all
wrapped up in empire-building, and did not really recover its original
vision until the ferment of the 60s. So much of today’s greatness came
out of the 60s.
First, I appreciated that that last volume put Kennedy’s vision of the
Peace Corps near the very beginning of chapter one. The Peace Corps
represents a good reason to send Americans overseas, in contrast to all
these “War Corps” projects we still like to get involved with. I have
been in the War Corps, and I didn’t like it, even though I never saw a
combat zone; my brothers have also been in the War Corps, and they HAVE seen combat zones. And then, on a similar note (as I see it), toward the end of the book was the protests against Vietnam: for the first time, a significant number of Americans seriously bothered to question whether America really ought to be at war. The only real example I know of from previous wars was Thoreau’s protest against the land-grab called the Mexican-American War, and he was practically a lone voice in a nation drunk on Manifest Destiny.
Then, too, the 60s were the age of Civil Rights – of Dr. King, Rosa
Parks, and the hundreds of others who finally brought an end to
segregation and Jim Crow. The spirit of the founding fathers had finally
reawakened – apropos enough, in the descendants of the slaves those
founding fathers once owned.
For these reasons, I am automatically suspicious of any organization,
like Focus on the Family, who feel that America was a better place before
the 60s (Focus on the Family specifies 1965), and who call for a return
to what they call “traditional values,” meaning the values of that
pre-60s time. To me, the half-century extending from 1960 to 2010 has
been the most fabulous half-century of all.
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