Well, the folks in my neighborhood did not enjoy many things that the average American takes for granted these days. We seldom ate out, for example. There were few restaurants in town, and they tended to be small rooms in the back of the local taverns. Just about the only time I can remember eating out as a boy was when my parents would take us to a local diner for breakfast when one of my brothers and sisters made their First Communion. Nowadays, there are many restaurants in the area, and they are busy. Vacations? I can’t remember anything beyond going for a day or two to my cousins’ homes on Long Island. It was the same with my friends. I can remember how we would stop and look at cars with decals on their back passenger seat windows from all the vacation spots the owners had visited — Lake George, Santa’s Workshop, the Catskill Game Farm, alligator farms in Florida — and wonder where those places were.
Speaking of cars — it was an event of major proportions when a new automobile parked on our block. Everyone would gather around it in awe, as if a UFO had landed. None of my friends’ parents had new cars. Used cars were the norm. Saturday mornings, half the cars on the street had the hoods up. Quite a few of my neighbors did not own a car at all. They would walk to their job at the local factory, or take a bus to the subway for their jobs in offices in Manhattan. Clothes? I can remember having just two pairs of blue jeans — we called them “dungarees” back then. I wore one while the other was in the wash. And one pair of sneakers and one pair of dress shoes. And my school uniform. My friends were in the same boat. There is no question that children on welfare dress better these days. My parents and five brothers and sisters and I shared one television and one hi-fi record player. My sisters had a small phonograph in the bedroom that three of them shared. There was one phone in the house.
So did the economy “work” better for the average person in the 1950s? Well, I hope my reminisces do not clear things up for you. Because they do not clear things up for me. Clearly life is better in some ways these days, worse in others. Inflation rates cannot explain all of the differences. I have lived a better life in economic terms than my mother and father did. But the same cannot be said for many of the friends I grew up with, who have not been able to live as well as their parents could with the factory jobs in my old neighborhood. I haven’t talked to any of them in recent months, but I would bet that they responded favorably to John Edwards’ speeches about “two Americas.” They feel left behind. But is it the economy’s fault that Indian and Korean immigrants are able to afford the homes that they grew up in, and that they can’t? If so, in what way? Not an easy question, if you ask me.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
How does one make up one’s mind about these things? The problem is that we lack the big picture. Our impression of the economy tends to be based on personal experiences. We will have a different view of things if we live in a prosperous suburb and the people in our family and our neighbors are working and living comfortably, than if we live in an area where factories are closing and the unemployment rates are high.
Reading the papers and listening to the pundits does not help much in this regard. Political partisanship muddies the waters. One has only to think of how the Democrats resorted to charges that we were “living through the worst economy since the Depression” in order to get Bill Clinton elected. They knew that was baloney. I suspect that Democrat activists laugh out loud when they get together and reminisce about how they got away with the scam. The same thing is going on this year, as John Kerry acts as if it was someone else with the name of John Kerry who was voting in the Senate all these years for the free-trade policies he now criticizes for shipping American jobs overseas.
So we can take the Democrats’ gloomy assessment of the economy with a grain of salt. They have an agenda. The same cannot be said about the conservative commentators who have split on the economy. Some of the liveliest debates over the plight of the average American worker can be found these days in the pages of conservative publications, between individuals who agree with each other on most other issues.
If we listen to Patrick Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts and Charley Reese, for example, we would think that the country is in a serious downward spiral, with American jobs being shipped overseas by transnational corporations with no allegiance beyond the bottom line. On the other hand, George Will, Rush Limbaugh and Thomas Sowell contend that the American standard of living is constantly improving, in spite of the unfortunate job losses that some workers experience as the economy goes through inevitable changes. Do we need more government regulation of the economy, or less? Protectionist measures or free trade? Socialized medicine? Privatized Social Security?
I don’t pretend to have an answer. I have no access to data that Thomas Sowell and Patrick Buchanan have missed. What I have to offer is only anecdotal evidence of how life has changed for blue-collar families since the 1940s. Take it for what it is worth. I promise that I will not stack the deck for political purposes. These are my honest observations about whether the American economy “works better” now than in the past.
I grew up in Queens in the 1950s, just a few miles behind where the visitor’s bullpen now is located at Shea Stadium. (There was no Shea Stadium when I was a boy. My friends and I took the subway to Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium.) My town was very working class. None of my friends’ parents were college graduates. In fact, none held the better civil service jobs; none were policemen or firemen. There were a few postal workers, sanitation workers and bus drivers. None held the better paying union jobs in construction. Most worked in one of the many factories in town. The paper goods manufacturer Lily-Tulip was a major employer in the area. I can remember when one of my friends began dating a girl from a neighboring town. We all kidded him for dating a “rich girl.” Her father was a manager of a local A&P, a major New York supermarket at the time.
You get my point: there wasn’t a lot of money floating around my neighborhood. Nonetheless, almost all of my friends’ parents owned their own homes, one of the many two-family houses in town (most of which are still standing and in demand on the real estate market by Korean and Indian immigrants). If they did not own their own homes, they rented an apartment in one of the two-family homes identical to that of the owner’s apartment. There was no social slight in being a renter. Renting was seen more as a choice than an indication of financial problems. Many of the neighborhood renters had better jobs than the homeowner. One of my friend’s parents rented [an apartment], but owned a small sailboat.
Education costs? Most of my friends went to our parish elementary school. There was no tuition. All of my teachers, from first grade through eighth grade were Dominican nuns. I would say that two-thirds of my graduation class went to a Catholic high school. I paid my own tuition of $10 a month from my earnings at my various part-time jobs. Even the prestigious Jesuit schools, such as Fordham Prep and Xavier, charged only $30 a month. I was also able to pay my college tuition at Fordham on my own. It was about $1000 per year. If I remember correctly, the tuition at St. John’s, Manhattan, St. Francis and Iona was a little less. Public colleges such as CCNY and Hunter were free. So clearly, things were easier for parents of that era as far as housing and education costs go. I can remember only one or two of my friends’ mothers who worked outside the home. Sounds pretty good, no?
