There are going to be a few posts coming up that concern politics in the US. I am not going into the events of the past few weeks, and probably not that much into the events of the past few months. But in another month, I will be 71 years old. I have always observed politics--I have had a lifelong fascination with history, and politics is history in the making. I am not that much of a partisan; I don't put bumper stickers on my cars, or go to rallies or contribute money to politicians. I have voted in elections since I was old enough--you still had to be 21 to vote when I started. But for this particular post, I want to look back at what US politics were like when I was growing up.
I grew up in a UAW household. My father worked for Ford, at a plant that made automatic transmissions. My parents grew up during the Depression, and they thought President Roosevelt was wonderful. My dad was the first of his family to finish high school. He did not get the chance to go to college. He was offered an opportunity after his graduation in 1936 to take a test for a scholarship, but it meant he would have to travel to the state capital to take the test, and his parents would not give him money for bus fare. College was not the big deal then that it became after World War II. By the '60s, many of my friends had fathers who had gone to college on the GI Bill after the war. But when my father was called up for the draft, he flunked the physical (he was recovering from a bout of pneumonia at the time). So he spent the war years working in a factory, making radios for the military. And of course, he could not qualify for the GI Bill.
But in the '60s, the distance between the college-educated and the blue-collar worker was not that large. Most of the college grads I knew back then were the first ones of their own families to attend college. And white-collar and blue-collar people mostly lived in the same neighborhoods, went to the same churches and sent their kids to the same schools. And many of them still remembered growing up in small towns and rural areas where the only people who had gone to college were the doctor, the lawyer, and the preacher.
And the two parties were not as far apart as they are now. They routinely worked together in Congress and state legislatures. Major cities like New York swapped the mayor's job back and forth from Democrat to Republican, and states often did the same with governors. They had worked together throughout the war years, and continued for quite a few years after. There were a few extremists in each party, but the mainstream of each side got along fairly well. It was a surprise to many when Barry Goldwater got the Republican nomination for president in 1964, and he was not that popular in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio where I lived. I remember one of his few partisans in my high school repeating Goldwater's slogan "In your heart you know he's right!" and being answered with "In your guts you know he's nuts!"--by the son of the Republican mayor!
The truth is, most Republicans in the Midwest in the mid-'60s were what would later be called "Rockefeller Republicans" after Nelson Rockefeller. They identified more with him and President Eisenhower than with Goldwater. (Eisenhower himself had to decide which party he belonged with when he began thinking of running for president!) And the Democrats of that day were still strong anti-Communists, and otherwise only slightly more liberal than most Republicans.
In those days, the Democrats were considered the party of the working man. The industrial unions were a major part of their strength. The Republicans were considered the party of business--both Big Business and small business (think US Chamber of Commerce--big--and local Chamber of Commerce--small).
That describes the political world that I grew up in. There were major changes in the '60s and after that had large effects on that world, and on my own political thinking. The next post will go into that.
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