I have begun to read the two volume series The Age of Reagan by Steven Hayward. The first volume is subtitled, “The Fall of the Old Liberal Order.” This is obviously a play on the title of the first book of Schlesinger’s three volume series on FDR, which I have also read. That book is called “The Crisis of the Old Order,” and is chiefly interesting as a view of things from the left as many of its insights have been superseded by Amity Schlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man. I recommend reading all three books.
Anyway, the first chapter is about 1964 as the “Apogee of Liberalism.” John Kennedy has been assassinated and LBJ is now president. What is the country like ? Since I remember this period well, I will intersperse my own observations with the author’s. First, the federal budget in 1964 was $100 billion. That’s right. The US budget was the same as California’s budget deficit in 2009 ! The GDP was $576 billion and the growth of the economy that year was 7%. Inflation was 1.2 % and the chief concern of the public was International Relations at 51%. This was still the time of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis had been only two years before. Seventy per-cent of Americans were confident that the government would “do the right thing” and this was Walter Cronkite’s America.
Personally, I watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report, sponsored by Texaco. I was a third year medical student, married still without children although my first would arrive in March, 1965. We were living in a two bedroom house in Eagle Rock, on Oak Grove Drive, for which we paid $100 per month rent. It was in a small compound of homes on a hill side and from the living room window, I could see the San Fernando Valley in the distance. We were driving an old VW bus I had bought from another student. My wife taught school in east LA and dropped me off each morning on her way to school. We managed on $200 a month from our parents plus a small amount I could earn doing routine histories and physicals in a local hospital plus a few insurance physicals.
Per capita income was $2,592 and the average manufacturing job paid $ 2.53 per hour. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average was 800. The IBM 360 mainframe computer came out and used microchip circuits. I had programmed an IBM 650 in 1959 when I worked for Douglas Aircraft Company in El Segundo. It had vacuum tubes and the memory was a spinning drum covered with magnetic tape material. It had 2000 addressable memory units, each with ten digits. First class postage was 5 cents and Zip Codes were introduced. The Ford Mustang was introduced and helped Ford recover from the Edsel fiasco. In 1968, flush with my surgery resident’s salary, I bought a Mustang convertible for $3050. The car payment was $95 per month for three years. I had put $50 down.
Jack Kemp led the Buffalo Bills to the AFL championship. The Supreme Court had banned prayer in public schools in 1962 but 88% of the public disagreed and 63% said they prayed regularly. Out-of-wedlock births were at 5% although, among blacks, they were up to 25%. Less than 10% of households were headed by single mothers. The divorce rate was 25%. The Hays Office was still censoring movies but LSD was legal and would be so for another two years. In 1966, the medical school Dean called me in to talk. I was student body president and he wanted to talk about a developing drug problem among medical students. He told me that 24 students in the sophomore class (of 68) were using drugs, mostly LSD. Several had been found crawling around on all fours in the student dorm barking like dogs. One student told him that he would take LSD and sit at the beach to hear the waves talk to him. The Dean told him that these hallucinations could be vivid. The student replied that, oh no, the waves were really talking to him. A half dozen of that class would either never graduate or not take an internship, lost to medicine. I didn’t know what to do about it either.
That was, as the Age of Reagan, points out, the end of a golden era of post war prosperity and cultural ease that affected all but black members of the population. The Vietnam War would end a lot of that but the social policies of Lyndon Johnson would also exacerbate social pathology that still plagues us as a nation. Probably the worst effect of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was inflation, aggravated by Jimmy Carter, it would change the way we all live. I bought my first house in 1969, just before the birth of my younger son and third child. I paid $35,000 with $3500 down and a second trust deed for another $3500. My house payments were $204 per month. Fifteen year later, that small house (1500 square feet) would be listed at $595,000. My house in MIssion Viejo, bought for $67,000 in 1972, would see a similar inflation. My medical school tuition in 1962 was $600 per semester or $1200 per year. Now USC medical school tuition is $40,000.
Crime, drugs and the failure of public education were further developments that I will discuss as I go through the book.
UPDATE: Fred explains what happened in a lot fewer words than I could. More from John Derbyshire. I’m not quite as pessimistic as those guys but I am close.
Culturally I think 1960 was the high-water mark. All downhill from there.
cassandra, I have been reading the Bernard Cornwell novels about England in the time of Alfred The Great. The tone is similar. They are aware that they are living in a time when society has been badly degraded by the social changes that have occurred since the Romans left. I almost feel that way although it is worse because I remember what it was like and worry about my kids. I’m not sure they realize the changes, which is just as well.
A totally different world…. My folks were kids, then….
I’m looking forward to more.
Wasn’t Nixon pretty much a big spending liberal on social policy, and thus shares some blame for inflation of the era?
Nixon actually was aware of the building inflation but he also had the Fed chief open the money spigots to help with his re-election. He closed the gold window because there was a run on gold as inflation built. Gold was still $35/ounce and private ownership of gold, except as jewelry, was illegal. Many of my friends were beginning to open Swiss bank accounts and buy Swiss Francs. Remember that 1966 was the end of the postwar bull market. There was a semi-recovery, then the severe bear market that came in 1974 as Nixon resigned. Nixon was the one who instituted wage and price controls, then removed them in 1973 on everything except medical charges. They were, of course, ineffective. He tried, weakly, to restrain inflation but there was the cost of Vietnam and the Democrat Congress.
Doombuggy:
Yes, Nixon was a Keynesian and his economic policies were disastrous. As Mike pointed out, besides taking us off the gold standard don’t forget that it was Nixon who instituted wage and price controls.
Nixon was a “big government conservative.” The size, scope, and power of the federal government grew under his administrations just as they had done under LBJ and Kennedy.
Now of course it’s OBVIOUSLY true that LBJ was a BIGGER (as well as less competent) booster of Big Government than Nixon and that it was his “guns AND butter” policies (supported by the Democratic Party) that lit the fuse for the economic meltdown of the ’70’s, we can’t very well give Nixon a pass.
(*SHRUG*)
Anyway… America is finished. Oh, they’ll be flashing of recovery over the years, but within two or three decades this nation will no longer be the America of 1960, 64, or even the mid ’80’s.
We’re simply not the same PEOPLE we were back then.
BILL
Those guys, except LBJ, were pikers compared to The O. We will never get back to the way it was in the 60s but we could get some stability by kicking out the Democrats next year. Somebody should offer a constitutional amendment cutting the Congressional staffs to five per Congressman and ten per Senator. The staffs are the ones writing all these bills the legislators don’t read.
Yes and those staffers are a bunch of glib young twenty/thirtysomethings who are bright and plugged-in but lack wisdom and perspective.
You’re both absolutely right about “de-staffing” Congress. I’ve been singing that song for decades!
Back in ’86 I spend a semester in London taking classes and interning with a British MP, Sir Teddy Taylor, since retired. Sir Teddy was at the time a senior back bencher of the governing Party and he had ONE full time researcher and me; he also SHARED a secretary with another MP.
Enabling each and every U.S. House Member and Senator to be a minor “noble” with “retainers” is a huge mistake. As Cassandra points out, the type of person who gravitates to these staff positions is the LAST person we want near the levers of power.
We don’t need a Constitutional Amendment, Mike – let’s save that for Term Limits. That said, each House should by internal regulation limit individual staff to a fraction of what now exists as “the norm.”
Oh… and Mike… if only it were the staffs writing all the legislation that our elected officials vote on without reading. No, it’s worse than that. Professional lobbyists and teams of special interest attorneys are writing the actual legislation.
As I’ve noted many times, we need to legislate – perhaps via Constitutional Amendment – standards of legislative language (and limits to length!) with the goal being that no bill is too large or complex for the average well educated American to read and understand.
BILL
Sometimes the only people who know what the bill does are the lobbyists. Often the staffs and the lobbyists are interchangeable. Years ago, I was in a group of CMA people who met with Senator Durenberger about health legislation. He told us there were two Senators who knew anything about health care. He was one. The others asked him how to vote.I doubt much has changed.
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