[PEN-L:11953] Re: Swing

["Eric Nilsson" <enilsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nathan wrote,
> One reason that the 40s, especially the war years, might have created a
> more socialist-mided public was the war itself.
The 1940s was certain a profound decade for many people. I can't
generalize from this, but my father's experiences might be relevant.

His parents were unemployed during much of the depression,
and did get jobs in war factories. My father was edited a
democratic party newspaper during the 1930s and still considers
FDR to be a god. He was quite left-leaning during this
period of time and attended meetings of left parties. He certainly
would have been a prime candidate for postwar left political
activity.

Yet, this did not happen. His experiences during WWII
were critical to this. He totally supported destroying fascism yet
his experiences with the war taught him that good things
in the abstract were experienced on a day-to-day level
quite differently.

That is, to him fighting fascism meant that almost on
a daily basis people he talked to one day were dead the
next. The major lesson he came away with was that the most
important thing about war was surviving because an individual's
death was meaningless in helping to further the ultimate goal of
the country/military.

Those who had similar experiences tended to no longer support
abstractions (e.g., socialism) with the fire they once did. Having just
survived a war in which they saw close-up unspeakable
horrors they just wanted to get on with their lives with
the end of the war. This was not just a mindless response
to their environment--my father and others in his unit were
engaged in on-going philosophical discussions of the meaning
of life, of war, of "the good", of the individual's responsibility,
where was God during this time, and so on.

At the same time, the millions in the military saw close up the
absurdities of huge bureaucratic organizations, which many believed
would be a key part of socialism. This tended to create in
the minds of many a very anti-state-bureaucracy attitude. (The
rise of the organization man in the 1950s might be  explained
by the fact that monopoly firms and their goals seemed so
much more reasonable than the military and its goals. Having
been involved in a horrible state bureaucracy engaged in a horrible
task--killing people--the capitalist bureaucracy was almost
delightful to be part of).

By the late 1940s I think many people's concern was, oddly
enough, not the possibility of the return of the depression
but "the bomb." That is, technology for many took center
stage both as a key cause of improvement in the quality of
life (higher productivity) and as the most feared thing. The
abstraction "capitalism" and "the capitalist" seemed
less important than the atom bomb.

Finally, perhaps not unimportant were messages such as my
father received indirectly from the FBI in the early postwar
period. My father was a very minor participant in postwar
Hollywood yet he was warned that he was getting involved
in too many organizations that the FBI considered to be
communist fronts. If he didn't want to get into trouble,
he should be careful about who his friends were. Of course,
my father was not involved in politics much during this
period but this message was clearly communicated to him.

The 1940s were key. Yet, what happened during that period
of time was very complex and certainly does not reduce
down to any simple formula. People who entered the
1940s with one set of political leanings entered the
1950s with a somewhat different set of political
and personal goals.

Eric
..
Eric Nilsson
Department of Economics
California State University
San Bernardino, CA 92407
enilsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx