1
WHAT WAS GLORIOUS ABOUT THE GLORIOUS THIRTY?
The lost U.S. paradise is associated with the country’s beginnings: there is nostalgia for the era of the Boston Tea Party, not for Trente Glorieuses and a heyday of state intervention to curb the excesses of capitalism.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Les Trentes Glorieuses. I had been talking and teaching about “postwar prosperity” and “the postwar boom” for decades before I came across this French usage that derives from a 1979 book that in English would be titled The Glorious Thirty, or the Invisible Revolution from 1946 to 1975.1 I immediately adopted the usage for two reasons. One is the precise dating for the meaning of “postwar.” The other is the “Glorious” tag, which strikes English-speaking ears as hyperbolic and for that reason establishes a much higher bar for evidentiary support than the weak and exclusively economic terms “prosperity” and “boom.”
I’ve been riding this hobby horse for a while in teaching and in public speeches, and it is amazing how even with use of the “Glorious Thirty” people think I’m talking only about the 1950s, which is seen as an especially repressive time for both blacks and women, not to mention gays, Latinx Americans, disabled people, and even Catholics, Jews, and non-WASP ethnic groups. When I had previously used “postwar” I recognized the ambiguous timeframe—sometimes meaning just the most formative years of the late 1940s and more often just the fifteen years from 1945 to 1960 that evokes “the ’50s”—so I had been scrupulous in defining “postwar prosperity” as lasting from 1947 to 1973, as tracked by the rise and fall of real weekly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers. Even so, people had difficulty detaching my “prosperous twenty-six” from “the ’50s.”
Maybe that is at least in part because I am a straight white guy, and that naturally engenders a suspicion that what I’m nostalgic for is the good old 1950s when straight white guys were uncontested kings, even among the poor and working class. Who knows what’s going on in my unconscious, but I am the kind of male who benefited from women’s liberation, both financially and culturally, in not having to be a sole breadwinner and not having to live up to a narrower view of masculinity than I was suited for. And in a variety of ways, both in youth and as an adult, I was profoundly influenced and positively affected by the civil rights movement, which added so much to and took nothing away from me. What’s more, us straight white guys still have a lot of our kingly advantages, even when we don’t explicitly claim them. No, I am nostalgic not for a better country, a better world, than we have now but instead for one going in a better direction—one that is more inclusive than in the past but one that would have a robust respect for the common and a constantly confirming sense that things could and should get progressively better for mediocrities, who constitute the vast majority of humanity.
Likewise, I am nostalgic not for a mere decade but instead for the entire expanse of the three decades from 1945 to 1975 that included both the 1950s and the 1960s, particularly for how those decades were linked not just as opposites but also in a unity of material prosperity and a transformation of moral and spiritual values, a unity of impersonal economic forces and highly personal social movements. As I see it, the unprecedented improvements in material conditions unleashed a flood of grand expectations, to use James Patterson’s telling title for his history of the period, and made these years not only a golden age of shared prosperity but, as both cause and consequence, a golden age of collective action as well.2 Like a flood, our grand expectations eventually overwhelmed us for a time, but we are still living in the enriched soil that those expectations left behind.
So, what was so glorious about those times—glorious not compared to some ideal world we can envision but rather compared to what preceded it (going back as far as you can go) and to what has followed and is following it? To what extent was it a thirty-year “century” of the common?
Though my primary interest is in what was happening back then to the two wings of free wage labor—the one I grew up in and the one I’ve spent the bulk of my life in since—I’ll start with the macroeconomic base.
These were years of superior economic growth, during which the GDP averaged better than 4 percent a year, while unemployment averaged under 5 percent and inflation around 2 percent until the oil shock of 1973–1974. Those are not perfect or even ideal numbers, but they are much better than anything before or since. During the nineteenth-century industrial revolutions in the United States, for example, economic growth averaged only 1.6 percent a year from 1839 into the twentieth century and then hovered around 3 percent for the first half of the twentieth century.3 Likewise, we have not seen anything like Glorious Thirty numbers since the early 1970s, averaging about 3.1 percent GDP growth in the last thirty years of the twentieth century and a little less than 2 percent in the first eighteen years of the twenty-first century.4 There have been important periods when either unemployment or inflation did as well or better but never both for such a sustained period as during the Glorious Thirty.5
Sustained low levels of unemployment and inflation during a strong period of economic growth is really, really good, but it would stretch even the French language to call it “glorious.” Though improvements in the general standard of living are likely during such a period, they are not inevitable, as we know from more recent if much shorter growth periods. Rising general standards of living (and working) during the Glorious Thirty are the core glories that led to other glories. The gold of this golden age came in two primary forms, money and time, namely the steady increases in real incomes, including the emergence and spread of discretionary income, and the overall increase in free time for what you will, including the emergence of what for most people was a whole new stage of life: retirement. Thus, it was not just prosperity itself that was glorious but also the way that prosperity was shared.
Real wages for all employees began their sustained rise in 1940 with the onset of World War II in Europe. Wages at that time were only slightly better than they had been in 1929, as the Great Depression had halted a substantial increase in real wages since the beginning of the century. In 1940 the average wage in 2020 dollars was about $24,000, but by 1970 it had climbed 110 percent to nearly $51,000—about $1,000 more than it is today (2020).6 These are “real” wages and incomes, meaning they are adjusted to take account of the corrosive effects of inflation on spending power; thus, they record a more than doubling of the general standard of living, a doubling of the amount of money people had to cover the costs of living their lives. Managerial and professional workers did somewhat better than the average during those thirty years, manufacturing workers about average; and domestic workers, farmworkers, retail sales, clerical workers, and others somewhat worse, but all advanced, and almost everybody advanced substantially.7
Though poverty (as we have measured it since the 1960s) was undoubtedly reduced during the full-employment years of World War II in the United States, we don’t have numbers that go back that far. The official series begins with 1959, but Frank Levy has calculated that the US poverty rate in 1949 was 32 percent and would have been higher than that in the preceding decades.8 By 1971 it had steadily declined to about 11 percent before it stopped declining and started creeping back up.9 That’s a 65 percent decrease in poverty in twenty-two years, from one of every three men, women, and children being poor to one of every ten. If that rate of decrease had continued, poverty would have been eliminated well before the dawn of the twenty-first century.10 The most recent poverty rate as I write is about 12 percent (during the COVID-19 recession), so on this score I might like to go back to 1971 when it was a point lower, but much more important than any particular state that was achieved by the end of the Glorious Thirty is that trajectory: the steady rise of wages and incomes and the steady reduction in poverty. The direction and its steadiness are what we should be nostalgic for.
The Economic Policy Institute’s series The State of Working America has for years been gathering data that compare US family incomes by quintiles across various time periods, always with the purpose of contrasting the tremendous growth of family incomes from the 1940s through the 1970s with what has happened since. The most recent version gives average annual growth rates by quintile, as shown in table 1.1.
Table 1.1 shows a thirty-two-year period, 1947 to 1979, when real family incomes at every level increased by more than 2 percent a year, followed by a twenty-eight-year period (1979–2007) during which incomes increased much more slowly, especially for the bottom 80 percent. This stagnation was followed by a much briefer period from the onset of the Great Recession in 2007–2009, when incomes for everybody except the top 5 percent actually declined. It also shows a dramatic reversal in the distribution of income growth, from the bottom fifth of families having the greatest gain during the glorious period to their losing income faster than any other group in the most recent period. That last row of table 1.1 shows a clear hierarchy of loss nowadays—the less you have, the more you lose.
Because these are small numbers, it is easy to look past them and see just the reversal of trend. But try to imagine how different living a life is when your real income goes up 2 percent a year versus one where it goes down 1 percent or so every year. In the former, life gets a little bit easier to live each year; in the latter, it gets a little bit harder. The annual change is fairly small—instead of having $100 you have either $102 or $99—so it is easy not to notice the change. But living in the first situation can make you feel like a genius and in the second like a failure. This is why Jean Fourastie called the Glorious Thirty an “invisible revolution.” These small annual changes accumulated into a series of transformations in everyday life, a revolution that because it was both slow and steady lacked drama and thus had limited visibility. What’s more, even though life was improving steadily, relentlessly, so too were expectations. An earlier version of The State of Working America showed that from 1947 to 1973 those small annual increases had more than doubled the family incomes of the bottom two and the middle quintiles, while the second and top quintiles increased by 97.5 percent and 88 percent, respectively. That’s right. For those twenty-six years the poor got richer faster than the rich, and so did the middle. Though founded on a longer revolution beginning nearly a century before, these years are when, in the words of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “We broke from the entirety of prior human existence, in which life was nasty, brutish, and short for almost everyone.”11 How could that not be glorious? And how could it be irrational and unrealistic to be nostalgic for that trajectory and its steadiness?
That steadiness had a certain weight of its own, independent of specific magnitudes of increase. Steady jobs with steadily increasing incomes came to be taken for granted not long after World War II, opening up the floodgates of consumer debt—from installment buying of cars and appliances to the emergence of the credit card including for people with blue collars, people who had not previously been deemed credit-worthy mostly because they had not previously been credit-worthy. Historian Louis Hyman calls the 1950s Charga-Plate “a new kind of social democracy at the checkout counter.”12 As Hyman shows, postwar consumer debt was a virtuous circle as long as real wages were rising, and it took a while for that debt to turn vicious after wages and incomes began to stagnate and then decline.13 Part of debt’s virtue during the Glorious Thirty was its macroeconomic effects in further fueling economic growth, but I’m not as nostalgic for that as I am for the way it piled on to an already expanding discretionary income.
Disposable income is simply your income after taxes are taken out—it may be a little or it may be a lot, but everybody has some of it. Discretionary income is different—it’s what’s left over after all your regular expenses have been paid (not just your taxes but also your rent or mortgage, food, clothing, etc.). Though I could not find a clear history of discretionary income, it’s safe to say that most people didn’t have any until somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Discretionary income is the money you have available to spend however you want. In a money economy based on free wage labor and a cash nexus, the expansion of discretionary income (both in individuals’ lives and in the proportion of people who have some of it) is a great leap forward for human freedom. And the widespread availability of credit added to that freedom. You could waste your money at the race track, or you could put it in your church’s donation plate; you could buy baubles and beads on impulse, or you could invest in cars and refrigerators, TVs, and automatic washers and dryers, things that would transform your daily activities and life; you could drink your discretionary income at the local bar, or you could save it for your children’s education. Discretionary income is that part of your wages that is “for what you will.” Its expansion during the Glorious Thirty was an enormous increase in freedom and one of the most glorious of the glories that have been and still are being eroded.
If discretionary is the better part of income, then it surely is also the better part of time. Most of the effort, the movement politics and government policies, that achieved the forty-hour workweek occurred before the Glorious Thirty, but it was not until the fall of 1945 that the five-day week and two-day weekend finally emerged as “a fixture of American life” and then remained so for three or four decades.14 The manufacturing workweek had declined from nearly seventy hours to about sixty during the nineteenth century, and the forty-eight-hour, six-day workweek had been achieved in great measure by the 1920s. The Great Depression posed the opposite problem—not enough and sporadic work, when many workers were basically day laborers who might work Monday through Wednesday one week, Thursday and Friday the next, and not at all the week after that. When the Fair Labor Standards Act established the forty-hour standard in 1938, the average workweek in manufacturing was actually only about thirty-five hours. Then during the full-employment economy of World War II there was so much overtime that the forty-eight-hour workweek of the 1920s was restored (though with the crucial difference that workers were paid 50 percent more for those “extra” eight hours, as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act).15 Though in a steel town with its rotating swing shifts there was no uniform Saturday and Sunday weekend, I grew up taking for granted and not appreciating that extra day off—that is, until as a professional worker I lost my weekends as my work steadily bled into them and until I watched as working-class jobs experienced increasing wage theft with overtime hours not being paid, while others had insufficient hours with irregular, contingent employment. Today we increasingly have the worst of both the Great Depression and World War II economies—not enough paid work for some and too much paid (and unpaid) work for others. It’s not yet worse than back in the day, but it’s heading that way. What was glorious about the weekend back then was not just the increase in leisure time it afforded (which many social scientists worried at the time might be misused and abused!) but rather the relative steadiness and reliability of that swath of time for what you will.
The official standard workweek for nonsalaried workers is still forty hours today, so there was no progress during the Glorious Thirty on this score, just the enjoyment of that extra day off. The American labor movement has often been criticized for failing to focus on reducing it further, but unions worked steadily during this period to reduce the work year by increasing days of paid vacation and holidays, much of which spilled over to nonunion workers. This was nothing to brag about compared to what unions would achieve in European countries, but it did have the effect of gradually expanding free time for what you will over a worker’s lifetime. Much more significant, however, was the emergence of retirement as a new stage of life after you were done with work—something very few workers had ever experienced or anticipated before 1950 or 1960.
The increasingly widespread availability of retirement during the Glorious Thirty had its foundations in earlier times in the increasing lifespans made possible by advances in sanitation and public health, the continuing miracles of modern medicine, and the creation of Social Security in 1935 as a foundation for private pensions. As Robert Gordon explains, “In earlier eras, workers often died before the age of retirement or had no financial resources enabling them to enjoy retirement, leaving them confined as dependents in the dwellings of their children.”16 In 1940 barely over half of men and about 60 percent of women survived from age twenty-one to age sixty-five, and at sixty-five their life expectancies were seventy-seven and eighty; by 1980 more than two-thirds of men and 81 percent of women survived those years, and their life expectancies at age sixty-five had increased an additional two and four years, respectively.17
But retirement could not have become a universal expectation and widespread reality without the spread of private pensions and health insurance during the postwar era—again largely as the result of the efforts of union workers, which came to benefit most other workers (but by no means all). In 1940, for example, only 7 percent of the labor force had private pensions, but by 1970, 45 percent did; this later declined to 35 percent by the early 1990s and then to 18 percent by the second decade of the twenty-first century.18 Likewise, we now have unarguably the least effective and most expensive health care system among advanced capitalist countries, but going into World War II most people did not have health care of any sort because they could not afford it. Fewer than 10 percent of private-sector workers were covered by health insurance in 1940, but by 1973, 87 percent were covered for hospital and 81 percent for surgical expenses. Private insurance coverage has been declining ever since, though Medicare and Medicaid (both passed during the Glorious Thirty) and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 have significantly filled some gaps.19 Medicare and the continuing advances in medical treatments get the bulk of the credit for life expectancy at age sixty increasing “more rapidly after 1940 than before,” but regardless of who or what gets the credit, adding a brand-new stage to life, whether complete with fancy vacations or just getting by, is a glorious increase in free time for what you will.20
This is what I’m nostalgic for—the enormous increase in net freedom for almost everybody based on the steady increase in both wages and “the time and ability to read and think and talk things over”—or to go fishing in the afternoon and write poetry in the evening, or to just simply hang out with your friends in a bar or at a prayer meeting, all the while cultivating your backyard garden or the window flower box in your apartment. You can criticize people for their consumerism, their rediscovery of fundamentalist religion, or their eventual evolution into couch potatoes—which many scholars, especially on the Left, have done to an exaggerated degree—but that newfound freedom of time and money was there and was gradually expanding for people to use, misuse, or both. That’s what I’m nostalgic for.
The Gold in Social Movements
Presenting these facts and figures in class and in public settings, at this point I often get complaints that all this might be true for whites or even just white men but that the Glorious Thirty was not such a golden age for black people, women, and gays.21 There is, of course, truth to this, as racial and gender inequalities of every sort, especially of the ideological or cultural sorts, were much worse for the entirety of this period than they are now. But such complaints also seem strange to me, since every January we celebrate the heyday of the civil rights movement from 1955 through 1968, which coincides with the public life and movement activism of Martin Luther King Jr., right at the heart of the Glorious Thirty. Likewise, gay pride parades in every major city each year are held in June because the Stonewall Riots during that month in 1969 are seen as the activist kickoff for gay liberation. And most histories of second-wave feminism (known as women’s liberation back then) locate the roots of the movement in the 1960s.22 Golden ages are times when important things turn and start moving in new and better directions (the original meaning of “revolution”), and if you’re looking for three decades when the arc of history got bent toward justice, you’re not going to do better than the Glorious Thirty.
Economics is part of it, the foundational part of it as I see it, but the upsurge of liberatory social movements during the Glorious Thirty is very much part of what makes those decades so glorious in retrospect. It may not have felt so great at the time, though there were moments of exhilaration and joy alongside those of frustration, confusion, and grief and a fair amount of fear and trembling. Those racial, gender, and sexual revolutions continue today, some such as LGBTQ rights still vigorously, but others are stalled or at best grinding out day-to-day progress against the grain of relentless economic deterioration for all but the top 20 or 10 or 5 percent. It wasn’t that way back in the day. The steady and over time enormous increases in money and time did not lead to complacency and mindless consumerism, as was feared at the time and still often claimed today, but instead to a golden age of organized collective action. And this is one of the most urgent lessons to be learned from harking back to the Glorious Thirty: shared prosperity didn’t co-opt common people with roast beef and apple pie; rather, it expanded their sense of the possible and their willingness to fight for it. Not everybody, of course, maybe not even a majority if you’re counting and definitely not all at the same time, but looking back over this thirty-year period the mainline of causation involves working-class agency creating shared prosperity, which on a sustained basis did exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville saw as the foundation of the French Revolution:
As the prosperity of France developed …, men’s minds appeared meanwhile more anxious and more unsettled. Public disquiet sharpened; the loathing of all ancient institutions was on the increase.… [T]he French found their situation all the more intolerable the better it became.… [E]xperience teaches us that the most hazardous moment for a bad government is normally when it is beginning to reform[,] … setting out to relieve [its] subjects’ suffering after a long period of oppression. The evils, patiently endured as inevitable, seem unbearable as soon as the idea of escaping them is conceived. Then the removal of an abuse seems to cast a sharper light on those still left and makes people more painfully aware of them; the burden has become lighter, it is true, but the sensitivity more acute.”23
By the 1950s the American labor movement had lost whatever revolutionary edge it might once have had, but it was not afraid to strike to make sure that whatever prosperity there might be would be shared with its members and the working class more broadly. No decade in American history saw more strikes than the supposedly placid 1950s, and the Glorious Thirty in fact opened and closed with two of the greatest strike waves in our history, 1945–1946 and 1967–1971.24 I have argued elsewhere that this enforced sharing of economic growth actually contributed to that growth, and without it there might not have been much “postwar prosperity” at all.25 That view is not even in the parking lot of the ballpark of mainstream economics today, but there is no doubt that union power throughout this period, the active agency of workers on strike or threatening to strike, was on the pitcher’s mound of the sharing.26 There might have been postwar prosperity without all those strikes and other forms of union power, but it surely would not have been shared anywhere nearly as much as it was. What’s more, even the highly institutionalized activities of American contract-based unions demonstrated the efficacy and power of organized collective action, as year after year they extracted money and time, amid much business whining and hand-wringing, from some of the biggest, most powerful organizations in the world. And the visible result was that prosperity was stronger than ever before (or since) and was more widely shared than ever before (or since).
As a further result, the “loathing of all ancient institutions” such as racial segregation, racial and ethnic hierarchies, patriarchy, and rigidly hypocritical sexual norms became more intense and acute. Each liberatory movement, including the labor movement, called forth a backlash of repression: for example, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the White Citizens Councils and a revived Ku Klux Klan, the American Psychiatric Association’s pathologizing of gays in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the all-fronts “containment strategy” to restore and keep women in their place.27 But until at least the late 1970s the backlashes just stimulated more creative, strategically complex, and determined collective action in the streets, in the courts and legislatures, and in neighborhoods and workplaces.
These liberatory movements occurred in serial order, usually involved different groups of people, and often conflicted with each other, sometimes bitterly. There was no unified uprising of the people. But as life got better, as money and time for what you will increased, as union workers demonstrated the power of organized collective action to change not just their circumstances but also the causal forces creating those circumstances, there was by the mid-1960s what James Patterson describes as a contagion of “organized movements among previously marginalized groups.”28
Patterson is unique among postwar historians in seeing rising expectations at the core of the period. For him, there is a clear causal chain: rising standards of working and living, prosperity in a word, caused “rising personal expectations [to grow] ever more grand,” and these “ever-larger expectations about life” led to a contagion of organized movements, not just the largest and most visible mentioned above but also farmworkers, senior citizens, the disabled, and Native Americans, Chicanos, and other ethnic-identity groups organized to change their circumstances, both economic and cultural.29 In Tocqueville’s words, “evils, patiently endured as inevitable, seem unbearable as soon as the idea of escaping them is conceived. Then the removal of an abuse seems to cast a sharper light on those still left.… [People] found their situation all the more intolerable the better it became.”30
The important thing here is not just that marginalized groups saw the gains being made by the unmarginalized and fought to be included; that’s part of it but probably not the most important part. Rather, it is the experience of gains for themselves, the experience of expanding free time and money for what you will, that spurred them on—that and the availability of organizing traditions from within which they could innovate. Likewise, at a certain point even attempts at repression began to have motivating as well as repressive effects both in spurring innovation and in requiring an increase in determination, a doubling down effect. Nothing illustrates this better than the black freedom movement during the Glorious Thirty.
First, there were real gains beginning with World War II when tight labor markets opened manufacturing and other jobs to blacks, mostly in the industrial North. There also was the exaggerated egalitarian ethos of World War II propaganda (only occasionally including blacks and then only as a result of organized protest) and the genuine unity of purpose during the war. Hypocritical rhetoric doesn’t always fuel grand expectations, but in this case it did, along with the experience of interracial organizing in the Congress of Industrial Organizations unions and of the wartime sacrifices involved in forbearing white racism. The Double V campaign for freedom and democracy at home as well as abroad was carried into the immediate postwar period, where it was largely but not entirely defeated by 1950.31 Repression of blacks and their struggles for equal rights and freedom intensified in the 1950s, but that repression was likely experienced more acutely because of the immediacy of the wartime experience of unity and the continuing rhetoric about a “century of the common man.” But real gains were continuing to be made as well, and if Tocqueville’s logic is right, that undoubtedly helped spur people on.
Black family incomes, for example, increased in real terms by about 40 percent from 1949 to 1959, about the same percentage as white family incomes though from a much smaller base.32 Beginning with the sit-ins in 1960 the level, degree, intensity, and sophistication of organizing—cultivated in various forms in the 1950s—systematically increased and spread to achieve the breakthroughs of the mid-1960s. By 1969 the median black family had increased its income by 128 percent in real terms since 1947, and in the 1960s it increased even faster than the white median.33 By 1970 black families made 61 percent of what white families did, up from 51 percent in 1949—the largest jump toward racial income equality in US history.34 This increase in real family incomes resulted from huge increases in clerical and professional employment for black women from 1940 to 1970—from 1 percent to 23 percent and from 5 percent to 11 percent, respectively.35 Likewise, black men gained increasing numbers of jobs in manufacturing from 1940 to 1970, by which time “black families were more dependent on manufacturing jobs than were whites.”36
African American legal scholar Randall Kennedy calls the period from the 1950s to the 1970s the “Second Reconstruction” because during those years “the distance traveled by blacks was astonishing.” Kennedy provides the following summary:
In 1950, segregation was deemed to be consistent with federal constitutional equal protection. No federal law prevented proprietors of hotels, restaurants, and other privately owned public accommodations from engaging in racial discrimination. No federal law prohibited private employers from discriminating on a racial basis against applicants for jobs or current employees. No federal law effectively counteracted racial disenfranchisement. No federal law outlawed racial discrimination in private housing transactions. In contrast, by 1970 federal constitutional law thoroughly repudiated the lie of separate but equal. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade racial discrimination in privately owned places of public accommodation and many areas of private employment. The 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the basis for strong prophylactic action against racial exclusion at the ballot box. The 1968 Fair Housing Act addressed racial exclusion in a market that had been zealously insulated against federal regulation. None of these interventions were wholly successful. All were compromised. All occasioned backlash. But the racial situation in 1970 and afterwards was dramatically better than what it had been in 1950 and before.37
The racial situation after 1970 would continue to be better than it had been in 1950, way better in many respects, but economically there has not been much progress since 1980. Many cultural attitudes have greatly improved; for example, 87 percent of the population now approves of black-white marriages, compared to 4 percent in 1950 and only 29 percent at the end of the Glorious Thirty.38 But African Americans are disproportionately represented in a working class whose living standards and working conditions have been deteriorating for nearly half a century now. As incomes stagnated and declined for almost everyone, they stagnated more for black families; the ratio of black-to-white incomes has actually declined since 1980, from 61 percent of average white incomes to 56 percent.39 The median real earnings of black male workers quadrupled from 1940 to 1980, starting from a miserably low base, but after that declined 8 percent to 2014.40 As shown in the family-income figures in table 1.1, since the Great Recession it is getting worse, as even the slow growth of family incomes has disappeared, throwing more people into poverty, especially for black people.41
Likewise, in Randall Kennedy’s list above, in every area except public accommodations, legal rights for blacks have been and are being pared back from whatever peak they once had reached, some of them after the Glorious Thirty but all moving in the wrong direction as I write. From the perspective of today and if you keep your eye on the trajectory, those years from 1945 to 1975 might look a bit more golden and glorious for black folks than they seemed at the time. Even expectations seem diminished today, as simply rearranging our criminal justice system so that it kills and incarcerates fewer young black men can seem like a bridge too far.
The other liberatory movements begun during the Glorious Thirty have somewhat more complicated trajectories, but like the black freedom movement itself, all are split by class with the professional middle class—whether black, women, gay, or Latinx—either continuing to progress or at least holding their own, while the working class in each group continues its steady spiral down toward living standards and working conditions that by the end of the Glorious Thirty were thought to be gone forever.42
The relationship between economic prosperity and liberatory movements that Tocqueville was the first to notice—that people can find “their situation all the more intolerable the better it [becomes]”—can still seem counterintuitive today. The assertion of a positive causal chain from the economic to the social psychological to the political has not attracted much social science inquiry, but a liberal economist and a conservative political scientist have subjected it to historical investigation and pretty much confirmed it as a common, though not universal, pattern. The liberal economist Benjamin M. Friedman examines the histories of the United States, Europe, and developing countries (mostly in the twentieth century) and finds the following correlation: “Economic growth—meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens—more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.”43 The conservative political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, looking at much the same history with a greater emphasis on developing countries, found “an apparent association between rapid economic growth and political instability,” because in many situations “economic growth increases well-being at one rate but social frustration at a faster rate.”44 Among these many situations are some pretty important ones: the Protestant Reformation and the English, American, French, Russian, and Mexican Revolutions.
Friedman and Huntington come at the same phenomenon from different angles. For Friedman, “a rising standard of living, over time … usually leads to the positive development of … a society’s moral character,” whereas Huntington is more concerned with the short-term consequences of economic growth leading to “social unrest” and “political instability.” Both point to “enhanced aspirations and expectations,” which Huntington fears will, “if unsatisfied, galvanize individuals and groups into politics,” while Friedman thinks these enhanced expectations make a society more likely to be more tolerant, fair-minded, and democratic.45 It seems to me both are right—one writing in 1968 and one in 2005—that shared prosperity is very likely to lead to social unrest and political instability as well as the positive development of a society’s moral character.
This dynamic process is nowhere better illustrated than during the Glorious Thirty in the United States. During its first half our big thinkers were so amazed at its “unprecedented prosperity” that they declared us an “affluent society” by 1959, and then seemingly out of nowhere, its second half surely had more than its share of social unrest and political instability.46 Huntington’s side of the Tocqueville thesis surely proves out. How about Friedman’s side, with its lofty proclamation about our moral character? Take 1940 as your starting point, for example, or go back for decades, centuries, or even millennia and see the strength and solidity of the taken-for-granted assumption that both blacks and women were naturally inferior to whites and men—an assumption that by now each generation of Americans finds harder and harder to believe that anybody could ever have thought.47 Racism and sexism take on different forms today, with unendingly cunning efforts at making comebacks, but is there any doubt that we’ve had a bit of positive moral development or, conversely, that our declining standards of living now threaten our character as a people?
Here’s the nub: Economic prosperity is good for the soul. There’s a puritanical backstory that makes many Americans assume or strongly suspect the opposite—that fear of falling and profound insecurity keep us on our toes and spur us on to do better than we would if we became comfortable with ourselves. The actual history of the Glorious Thirty suggests otherwise, whether you’re looking at productivity growth and innovation or at the impacts the rolling “rights revolutions” had on so many common, mediocre people’s lives.48 Once upon a time we had rising standards of living for everybody, and being fat and happy didn’t lead to widely feared complacency and soul-eroding hedonism but instead to a kind of “transvaluation of all values,” in Friedrich Nietzsche’s memorable phrase. The removal of one injustice just caused us to notice another and another. As our burdens became lighter our sensitivities became more acute, and we found our situation all the more intolerable the better it became. I can tell you that it didn’t always, or even usually, feel so great to live through all these intolerably acute sensitivities, but it was exciting and soul-expanding too. Many parts of it felt glorious at the time but not nearly as glorious as it seems now that it’s gone.
When it was over, when we eventually had our falling to ground, I was relieved. As we ignominiously fled from Vietnam in 1975, I felt like I could finally relax. I didn’t know that living standards had already begun their long-run declines or that the professional middle class I was still working hard to become part of would separate itself more emphatically from working-class ways. I didn’t know that as economic expectations began to diminish, the class cultures I had trafficked between and among would both become narrower, less open and less supple, as they more and more lost contact with each other.
This is the final glory of the Glorious Thirty in my reckoning—the simultaneous rise of middle-class professionalism as a dominant culture and the solidification of a working-class culture craftily expanding, exploring, and enjoying the for-what-you-will parts of life.
There are two kinds of upward mobility, in many ways the very core of the so-called American Dream. Both involve “getting ahead” but in two different forms: one is simply getting ahead of where you were before, and one is getting ahead of others, advancing your position in a hierarchy of positions. Because advancing your position inevitably includes getting ahead of where you were before, the two are easily confused. Likewise, getting substantially ahead of where you were before can feel like a change of position even when it isn’t, especially if you are not concerned with—or, as is quite common in the working class, even have contempt for—what others see only as hierarchy. Both kinds of upward mobility flourished during the Glorious Thirty as never before or since.49 And because they did, they strengthened each other. To get ahead you didn’t need to change your position, to transform yourself into something you were not and did not want to be. On the other hand, if you did want to transform yourself and become something or somebody you were not, there were many avenues and much encouragement for doing that. Having that choice was pretty glorious too, both at the time and looking back! In fact, for me it is a primary glory I don’t want forgotten, one built on all those other glories. Shared prosperity, a taken-for-granted (if exaggerated) economic security, and small but steady expansions in time and money for what you will allowed—indeed nurtured—a freedom to either be yourself or become an altogether new self or, as I did, do a bit of each.