Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!
Somebody’s gotta say it.
So, we will. (And we’re repeating ourselves.)
We don’t want to go back to a 1950s-style America.
Rosie the Riveter, who played a critical role in retooling U.S. industry from peacetime to wartime production, who was on the shop floor from 1942 to 1947, increasing national wartime production to undreamt of levels, was removed from the factory floor and her war- and nation-saving accomplishments wiped from the national consciousness. In the 1950s, Rosie was expected to “know her place” - teaching, nursing, the kitchen and the bedroom.
Consider the essay “Feature Article: Flashback – Parenting and Summer in the 1950s” published by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (July 12, 2018):
“Imagine you are the parent of school-aged children in the summer of 1950. With the school year completed, summer beginning, and fireworks illuminating the skies of early July, a new worry appears — how to protect your child from polio. Swimming pools may not merely be an oasis on a hot summer day; they could also be a breeding ground. Movie theaters and other communal gathering spots are more than places for leisure; they’re now places to avoid. Some are even shut down. Candy is rumored to be a cause. Maybe the crowding of the cities is bad, and you consider sending your kids to the country for the summer to avoid densely populated areas. Every sore throat, fever or stiff muscle triggers fear. How is this disease spread, and how can it be prevented?
“For parents of children in early to mid-20th century America, this was a reality. During the height of the polio threat in America (1900-1950s), these concerns were all too real. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1950 and 1953 there were approximately 119,000 cases of paralytic polio in the United States and 6,600 deaths.
“Polio, a highly contagious virus, affected people differently. Most of those infected were asymptomatic; others had mild symptoms such as sore throat, fever, stomach pain or vomiting. Yet for some it caused paralysis and sometimes, death.
‘While polio could occur during the school year, outbreaks peaked during the summer months, and children were the most susceptible.”
In its May 9, 2024 publication History of Measles, the Center for Disease Control reported:
“In the decade before [a measles vaccine became available in 1963], nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years old. It is estimated 3 to 4 million people in the United States were infected each year. Among reported measles cases each year, an estimated:
400 to 500 people died
48,000 were hospitalized
1,000 suffered encephalitis (swelling of the brain)
Writing at History.com (September 11, 2023. “When Polio Triggered Fear and Panic Among Parents in the 1950s”) Volker Janssen notes:
“Fearful of the spread of the contagious virus, the city closed pools, swimming holes, movie theaters, schools and churches, forcing priests to reach out to their congregations on local radio. Some motorists who had to stop for gas in San Angelo would not fill up their deflated tires, afraid they’d bring home air containing the infectious virus. And one of the town’s best physicians diagnosed his patients based on his “clinical impression” rather than taking the chance of getting infected during the administration of the proper diagnostic test…
“The virus was poliomyelitis, a highly contagious disease with symptoms including common flu-like symptoms such as sore throat, fever, tiredness, headache, a stiff neck and stomach ache. For a few though, polio affected the brain and spinal cord, which could lead meningitis and, for one out of 200, paralysis. For two to 10 of those suffering paralysis, the end result was death….”
In 1950, cardiovascular disease and cancer accounted for nearly three quarters of all American deaths. In 1955 [We chose the middle of the decade.] life expectancy for men was 66.7 years and 72.8 years for women, according to the University of California, Berkeley. In 2024, life expectancy for both sexes is 77.5 years, 74.8 years for men and 80.2 years for women. In recent years, these numbers have been affected – slightly lowered – by COVID-19, drug overdoses and (male) suicides.
In America of the 1950s, Black veterans of World War II and the Korean War were expected to “know their place” – the “other side of town.”
In the 1950s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest denomination of Mormonism, excluded Black men and women from participating in the “temple ordinances” necessary for the highest level of salvation, prevented men of Black African descent from being ordained into the church’s all-male priesthood and taught religious Black people would be made white after death.
In a 1944 letter to segregationist Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, Robert Byrd, who would serve as a U.S. senator from North Carolina from 1959 to 2010, wrote:
“I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
Issuing Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman created the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, officially mandating the desegregation of the U.S. military. [We’ll acknowledge that wasn’t part of the 1950s; but barely.]
Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases before the United States Supreme Court, but it wasn’t until he argued his landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education that the “separate but equal doctrine” was rejected and the Court held segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. On July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign promise and announced that he would nominate Sandra Day O’Connor as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall as the first Black justice of the court.
Lila Fenwick became the first African American to graduate Harvard Law School in 1958.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the “Estimated average annual salary of teachers in public elementary and secondary schools: Selected years, 1959-60” was $4,995 for all teachers; $4,815 for elementary teachers and $5,276 for secondary school teachers.” Those figures break down to $53,017 for all teachers, $51,106 for elementary school teachers and $55,999 for high school teachers today.
An April 18, 2024 post on the NEA site – “2024 Reports: Educator Pay in America” -reported the “National Average Starting Teacher Salary” in 2024 is $44,530 and the “National Average Teacher Salary” is $69,544. In other words, a brand new teacher and one helluva lot of teachers would have been better off in 1959-1960 than they are today.
The same site offered three “Key Takeaways”:
Even with record-level increases in some states, average teacher pay has failed to keep up with inflation over the past decade. Adjusted for inflation, teachers are making 5% less than they did 10 years ago.
At 3.9%, the increase in the average starting salary was the largest in 14 years that NEA has been tracking teacher salary benchmarks. However, when adjusted for inflation, the starting teacher salaries are now $4,273 below the 2008-2009 levels.
The union advantage: Teachers earn 26% more, on average, in states with collective bargaining, and education support professionals earn 16% more.
Once known as Europe’s breadbasket, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union in 1955, only becoming the first former Soviet republic to peacefully transfer power in 1994. In February 2022, Russian President Vladamir Putin falsely claimed Ukraine never had stable statehood and said the country was part Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space” – justifying the Russian invasion of Ukraine a few days later.
“Russia” – the Soviet Union - was much bigger in 1955. The following – once-occupied by Russia/Soviet Union – declared their independence in
1990
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
1991
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Tajikistan
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Belarus
Moldova
Ukraine
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Georgia
We cannot help but wonder if those who want to return to the 1950s and ‘60s are willing to tell all those folks that they should return to Russian/Soviet domination and oppression.
The outstanding website History.com (“How ‘Duck-and-Cover’ Drills Channeled America’s Cold War Anxiety” – March 26, 2019) reminds us:
“On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device at a remote site in Kazakhstan, signaling a new and terrifying phase in the Cold War. By the early 1950s, schools across the United States were training students to dive under their desks and cover their heads. The now-infamous duck-and-cover drills simulated what should be done in case of an atomic attack and channeled a growing panic over an escalating arms race.
“’During this period, the United States is suddenly having to really reckon with the fact that it is not the only nuclear power out there anymore,’ says Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear weapons and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. ‘Now, instead of just seeing the bomb as this asset that we could use or not use...it suddenly is brought to bear that this is something that could be used against us.’”
Duck-and-cover drills faded into history in the 1980s, “But Hawaii remains an exception,” as National Public Radio reported on December 19, 2017 (“Nuclear Strike Drills Faded Away In The 1980s. It May Be Time To Dust Them Off”)”
“The jitters over North Korea's missile tests have led Hawaii to bring back air raid sirens. The state already has sirens in place in case of tsunami, but starting this month the state will once again test the ‘wailing tone’ meant specifically to warn of attack.”
But “duck and cover” taught three decades of American grade schoolers “Be afraid! Be very afraid! of those dirty commies that are planning to blow us all to smithereens! Russians! Commies! Marxists! They’re all the same and they want to bomb us!” That fear of those “Russians! Commies! Marxist!” remains buried deep in the deciding psyches of more than a generation of American voters and one political party is using it to garner votes.
Thirty-plus years after the evaporation [Pun intended.] of Duck-and-Cover we have “Active Shooter Drills.” Well, sort of.
On July 24, The New York Times (“New York Bans Realistic Active Shooter Drills in Schools.” Shayla Colon) reported:
“The New York State Education Department is banning realistic active shooter drills in schools in an effort to make them less traumatic for students.
“The state’s new rules call for a “trauma-informed” and “age-appropriate” approach to drills that excludes the use of any props, actors or tactics depicting violence when school or extracurricular activities are in session. The new rules also require schools to notify staff members and pupils about drills ahead of time. Parents are to be notified a week in advance…
“New York’s ban on realistic shooter drills comes as the United States is grappling with an ongoing epidemic of gun violence. There were at least 118 episodes involving gunfire on school grounds in 2024, according to data collected from news accounts by the group Everytown for Gun Safety. That number is about double what it was a decade ago….”
What a strange world we live in.
What a strange country we live in.
One political party in the presidential election wants us committed to bump stocks, military-style rifles, armor piercing bullets and the accoutrements of mass murders and, long after the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, when the economies of California (US$3.4 trillion) and Texas (US$2 trillion) are greater than that of Russia (US$1.5 trillion), wants us to be afraid of the “communists, socialists and Marxists” and tells us “Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!”
We can only presume that they (and their “christian” nationalist allies) have never read the assurances of the Resurrected Jesus: “Be not afraid. Behold I am with you always.”