1979
I intended to summarize the decade today, as a dull journalist should at this turn of the earth, but fell instead to thinking about my grandfather, who was born 125 years ago. That was in 1854, and though he is dead now and beyond the tedium of journalists’ year-end and decade-end summations, I wonder what, if anything, that happened from 1970 through 1979 would have struck him as worth reading about.
Very little, I suspect, at least if he could be treated to a century-and-a-quarter roundup covering the three generations which the two of us bestride. Perhaps the California custom of holding group assemblies in tubs of hot water would bemuse him briefly, or the frequency of public demonstrations by homosexuals, but even these seem small chaff compared to the eerie curiosities of the 1920’s.
Prohibition, women wearing stockings rolled below the knees, gangsters running about with tommy guns—such stuff would surely strike him as stranger and more entertaining than anything that happened in the 1970’s.
Would the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon interest a man who had only an hour to read a summation of the past 125 years?
It seems doubtful. How many people today are interested in the impeachment of Andrew Jackson, which occurred when my grandfather was an adolescent? In fact, the politics and the diplomacy of the 1970’s would surely be skipped entirely in my grandfather’s precious hour of reading time, for except to scholars and Washington’s pundits, they have been as complex, incomprehensible and dull as any politics and diplomacy since the maneuvers of the Whigs and Tories in the reign of Good Queen Anne.
Who of us alive today would linger during a 125-year roundup over the Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland and Harrison Administrations? Yet they were at least as engrossing as the Nixon, Ford and Carter years.
My guess that Grandfather would have had an hour to devote to a 125-year roundup may be on the liberal side. He did heavy work with his hands and had only kerosene lamps to read by. Eyeglasses were not very sophisticated even by the time of his death, and night comes early in December to tempt a tired man to bed.
If he could have had the entire 125-year record set before him, he would probably have considered news of the electrification of Morrisonville, the village in which he lived, more absorbing than stories of 1970 oil profits, the troubles of the equal rights amendment or the 1976 debates between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
The story of the mass-produced automobile replacing the horse would have been read with particular dismay, for he was a blacksmith. But that truly weighty development occurred long before the seventies. He might have lingered a moment with pleasure over the tale of the automobile’s decline in the otherwise uninteresting seventies.
He might even have said a good word for the Arabs, though this is speculative, for he believed in supporting his own Government so firmly that, though a Virginian, he sided with the Union during the Civil War.
The 1970’s did not produce any bellicose event in a weight class with the Civil War, or the World War for that matter, or World War II, or the Korean War, or the Vietnam war. In fact in any list of the ten most vital events, moments in history, startling occurrences or earthshaking developments, the seventies would be hard-pressed to get into a 125-year summation.
In this period Germany became a nation, the British Empire disappeared, revolutions in Russia and China reshaped the nature of world power, a hundred colonial enclaves became independent nations and the United States became the most powerful state on the planet, but none of these happened in the 1970’s. In the seventies, the United States quarreled with Cuba about who had the right to do what in Africa.
During the 125 years since my grandfather’s birth, the American continent was joined by rail, slavery was abolished, the atom was cracked, the world was linked by airborne machinery and men traveled to the moon. But none of these things happened in the 1970’s. In the seventies the television set was adapted for the playing of electronic games in the home.
It appears that the 1970’s claim to distinction will be that it was the time when the United States became poorer. I cannot imagine my grandfather wasting much time over this development when other decades have so much to tantalize the reader’s eye. Until his death, he lived in a community without plumbing, central heating, electricity, a radio, a telephone, a paved road, a car or a grocery with a frozen-juice department, and he sent his sons to work after fourth grade for $5 a month, and it is doubtful that he ever felt poor, and it is doubtful that he would have much time for a nation that does feel poor because a lot of people can’t afford to keep the parlor heated to seventy-two degrees.
My hunch is that he would have dropped off to sleep before reaching the 1970’s, but that, if he hadn’t, he would have said, “This story starts off real good, but it sure does get dull in the last chapter.”