Until 1947 America had no history. After a decade of depression followed by six years of war, social stress had dislocated the patterns of too many American lives. To understand the nature of post-war America, it necessary to come to terms with this disruption.
By 1929, industrialization was a fait accompli. The stock market run was in part fueled by the growing awareness of the average citizen of the new financial and industrial power of their country. The mercantile capitals of New York, Chicago, and St. Louis were booming. Rural electrification was underway, airplanes were becoming common, and the rail system was consolidating. Yet, for most Americans, the patterns of life were still agrarian. Roughly 25% of employed peoples worked in agriculture. Just less than half of the population still lived in rural settings. Agrarian patterns still made up the core values of the majority of Americans.
The rise of the urban myth of wealth, industry, progress, and freedom competed directly with the older agrarian myths of stability, tradition, husbandry and the land. Tens of thousands were drawn to new urban centers to pursue this new dream. In time, the urban centers would have won out, as they had already in many European countries.
The depression, however, intervened. The myth of endless wealth, endless growth, and endless possibility suffered a stunning setback in the financial collapse of the Great Crash. Factory workers were laid off, mills were closed, small investors lost all their capital, and the lights of the roaring twenties dimmed and went dark. The urban dream was temporarily shattered.
The depression also reached the countryside. Commodity prices plummeted, international markets shut down and farming became at best a marginal existence. Added to the misery was an extended drought in parts of the Great Planes. Farmers moved to cities, factory workers moved back to farms, folks of all types moved west.
The most important turning point for the depression was the start of WWII. Investment and orders began to flow into the US from Europe for virtually every type of good. The US Military also began a rearmament program that, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, became a huge military and industrial project. Millions of people were taken into the military and millions more into industries that supported the military. This was not the heady industrialist utopia of the roaring twenties. This was a unified national effort to fight and win a war.
When the war was over, America was a world power both economically and militarily. But, though the war was over, and while it had been transformative, its meaning was gone. Looking back beyond the war from 1946, one would have found the great depression. Beyond the depression, one found only the dim memories of the beautiful ghost that was the twenties. And so, en masse, Americans looked to the future. Without history, the dislocations of the war seemed natural. We were, as endless commentaries from the time point out, on the move. The extended family, stressed from the depression and the shifting of industrial populations during the war, dissolved into the nuclear family. Mom, Dad and two kids all fit into a single car and could move. The population was firmly urban now, and urban landscapes were becoming shockingly uniform.
The rest as they say, is history. We have moved further and faster. Our families have grown smaller – half of all suburban homes have only one resident – and our attachment to place has become tenuous. We live in an echo chamber of no history. When the bohemians of the late fifties and early sixties formed their disparate communities they did not reach into the past. The short-lived folk-music revival quickly dissipated and gave way to the new. They were against conformity, corporatism, and materialism and for . . . almost nothing at all.
The civil rights movements in their many incarnations looked firmly away from the past. African Americans and women, Asian Americans and Hispanics imagined equality as being just like white males, here and now. What other models, after all, were there?
Nostalgia haunts our culture, for we imagine something must have existed at sometime that had some meaning. Therefore, when more than 20,000 people appear in Port Townsend to gape at floating totems of a lost age, there should be little wonder. Once there were designers who dreamed in elegant lines, craftsmen who knew wood and water, sail-makers to dress the wind. The thousands will pause and wonder, moved by the living spirits of their own lost histories. Then they will move on, free as they are of ties to place and craft, tradition, lore, and all that has vanished. As they drive away, a memory will pass, a feeling of something stirred and then put to rest – and then . . . nothing.