The American Middle Class: On The Way Out

By Allen J Duffis
Published: October 13, 2005

     In 1992, Olympia Washington’s Evergreen State College Professor of History and Family Studies, Stephanie Coontz, wrote a well researched book entitled - “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” Ms. Coontz is also the Director of Research and a Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families.

     It should be noted that Evergreen State College is a Liberal Arts college, renowned for being a key bastion of the radical Left. The institution is also home to a healthy portion of politically active teachers who, themselves, have espoused some radical social theories.

     Evergreen has a course entitled, “Engaging Cuba: Uncommon Approaches to the Common Good”. From what I’ve read of it, the course tends to glorify Fidel Castro’s Cuba for its successes in health care, education and agricultural development, without much mention of its human rights abuses. And the college actually has a course on the positive side of the homosexual lifestyle.

     I am not attempting to paint Professor Coontz as the intellectual outgrowth of some sort of radical, communist campus ideology. What I am suggesting, however, is that considering the educational surroundings she has chosen to embed herself in, one would suspect that, caught in any oppositional wind, she may have a decided tendency to lean to the left.

     I make this point because no matter how one interprets it, Ms. Coontz’s book is a subtle assault on the American Middle Class value system (a longtime favorite whipping boy of the political Left), even though she may not have intended it to be so. On this point, considering the diligent research she appears to have put into it, as a scientist, I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt as to her intentions.

     The key assertion of the professor’s work is that the way in which the 1950’s middle class recollect family attributes and moral values of the period, is in fact no more than a self imposed mass illusion. And further yet she asserts, it is one that the 50s’ alumni continually employ to browbeat present and future generations as to the superiority of the times and, naturally, the nuclear family life thereof.

     In fact, by her own admissions in several televised interviews, the debunking of this supposed myth was the driving force behind her literary effort. I of course fully disagree with her because, I was there and she wasn’t.

     What it comes down to is the age old question of who knows more about the Civil War: A soldier who fought in many battles, or a historian who years later reads several well written history books?

     The correct answer is the historian, because he will have the collected knowledge of the conflict. But he will not know the taste, feel, sounds and smell of blood, which is far more indicative of the struggle than all the books ever written about it.

     To gain that perspective one has to be there at the time. I was there in the 1950’s, a Black kid, growing up in New York City’s Harlem, and I was fully aware that the times were not “Ozzie and Harriet” perfect.

     The Emmett Till murder of 1955 took place in Mississippi, where the Saturday night lynching of Black people was common. I was 15 years old at the time, and suffered the displeasure of viewing some incredibly gruesome photographs of what had been done to this innocent young Black boy, barely a year younger than myself.

     During that same period, I was prevented from seeing George Reeves (the star of the then popular television series, “The Adventures of Superman”) during his frequent personal appearances at the famed Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. Why? Because the pavilion where the event took place was through the swimming pool area, where signs stated “Whites Only”.

     All of this aside, I still disagree with Ms. Coontz assertions. I am not by any means stating that the 1950’s were perfect, but without doubt in the minds and recollections of those who lived through the period the times were far better than present times, especially for families.

     FDR promised under the New Deal, “a chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage and higher education for all our children.” Well in fact, from about 1953 to 1973, middle class America actually achieved that status.

     Now the cost of any meat is almost out of reach, their children graduate college with a small mortgage to pay off the cost, and fewer and fewer can afford to fill up one car with gasoline, much less two.

     At present, the traditional American Middle Class family is being battered from the Left and Right. And bit-by-bit, this strategic faction of the American Society is being eroded. They are taxed by the Right to give to the wealthy, and forced by the left to support the Welfare State.

     Since medieval times, the middle class has been the lynchpin that has held civilized societies together; no society that has lost them has ever long survived. And the lynchpin of the middle class itself has always been the Nuclear Family: father, mother, children and grandparents.

     What Ms. Coontz fails to address in her book is a factor, most likely due to her age that she could not have been aware of. We of the 50s’ well knew that the “Ozzie and Harriet”, “Donna Reed”, “Leave It to Beaver”, “Father Knows Best” (and even “Amos and Andy”) depictions of family life were, for the most part, fictional.

     Yes, we knew it then and we know it now. But what she doesn’t understand was the equally important factor that it was the template of what we ‘all’ wanted – be we Black, White, Hispanic or Chinese. The syndrome was known as “The American Dream”.

     Unfortunately, for all intents and purposes, that dream is now just a figment of our imagination. Under siege from the corporate world to work for longer stress ridden hours (for what amounts to less pay and family exposure), while fighting off the militant left that wants to reduce the family to a hybrid model that will encompass chosen single parenthood and homosexual unions, the American Middle Class is ever rapidly losing the battle.

     The only realistic chance they have is to form a Third Party that will represent the middle class almost exclusively. And in order to do that, they must stop fighting among themselves over abortion, religion in schools issues, gay rights, right to die ethics and other distractions, principally brought about by the major parties (both Democratic and Republican) to inflate their membership and party coffers.

     It is time for the great ‘silent majority’ that is Middle Class America to wake up and smell, not the coffee, but the smoke. That smoke is the burning of not only the Constitution, but also the America they built.

     Think about it, isn’t America worth saving? Aren’t you, as a class, worth saving? Then before its too late, form your ‘own’ representative Third Party. It’s the only way to your salvation and, more importantly, America’s.