Flu season sends chills through me. Literally

As the U.S. finds itself in the worst flu epidemic in years, I am chillingly reminded of flu epidemics past. Scary tales  of the devastating  flu epidemic of 1918 that haunted me through my childhood when member of my own grandmother’s well-to-do family were struck down and perished in the prime of their life come racing back.

Closer to home was the winter of 1957 when the Asiatic Flu terrorized the nation, and my own family.

A Chilly Cold War Winter

1957 was a gloomy winter; as bitter cold as Frost Bite Falls, and everyone was coming down with some ailment.

Despite all my Mothers  precautions  by early February she started sending out distress signals. Knocked out with the all too familiar quartet of body aches, fever, sniffles and cough, our germ proof house had been invaded; Mom got the flu.

As obsessed as my father was with the Cold War, my mother was equally concerned about the war on colds.

To each end they were constantly on alert for unseen, unknown, camouflaged enemies ready to insinuate themselves into our safe environment.

I was always told the best way to avoid contagious diseases, was to avoid any and all contact with anyone coughing or sneezing in your immediate perimeter. Like a heat seeking missile, a careless sneeze, or an explosive cough could shoot troublesome germs in your direction at a mile a minute speed.

Choose One from Column A  and One From Column B

Always convinced it was the sub gum chow mein that was the culprit for her cold, Mom was sure she had seen the waiter at Chung King Gardens, sneeze into her food. Dad, on the other hand, was sure the guilty party was to be found at Ming’s Chinese Laundry where Mom dropped off his shirts every week. Ming’s wife always seemed to have a hacking cough, as she sprayed his Van Heusen shirts with heavy starch.

Whatever the origin, that February Mom came down not with a cold but  with a nasty case of the Asiatic Flu that was spreading through the country.

Everyone was panicking- yet another invisible invader that could attack without warning. Like a Soviet Satellite, it was traveling around the world at alarming speed.

The flu was on the march, and health authorities everywhere were girding for battle against an epidemic. While the government was working like mad to get a vaccine available, that pesky little devil of a virus snuck into Moms bloodstream when no one was looking.

Just as an opportunist, Fidel Castro had recently emerged triumphant out of the groundswell of discontent in Cuba, so a run-down Mom had been susceptible to catch a virus. “Like the Communists in Cuba,” Dad grumbled derisively, “the flu had infiltrated the United States and established a beachhead in our very own home.”

According to Dad, the Castro menace was not imaginary.

That a bearded, bombastic young man on a small island could so menace an entire hemisphere seems almost inconceivable. But panicked Americans were convinced charismatic Castro and his Communist confederates were aiming to undermine the influence of the US and break its ties through Latin America.

We had to keep Castro’s poison from spreading any deeper.  Much like President Eisenhower, who wanted to rid our Western Hemisphere of the red rash just ninety miles from Florida, Mom wanted to halt further aggression of the flu on Western Park Drive.

The flu had brutally taken over much of the eastern seaboard this winter and like the insurgent Communists, posed a grave threat to the free healthy members of our house. Both situations required a corrective.

Asiatic Flu

 Asiatic flu was a new and highly infectious form of influenza which had originated in Red China.

Dad was certain this latest epidemic was true germ warfare, certain that Chairman Mao had something to do with the virus’s Great Leap Forward.

Previously, the Chinese had bitterly accused congenial, fair-minded Americans, of secretly using germ warfare during the Korean conflict, and now Dad was sure they were retaliating. The Chinese themselves were on the march towards massive power.

“The Red Army had a bloody record of aggression in Korea and Quemoy,” Dad griped, “and now their damn Commie Virus had invaded us.”

Fowl Play

Once Mom’s fever rose above 101, the cold war got hot.

Just as our government had devised “Operation Mongoose,” a plan to overthrow Castro’s regime, together my parents adopted a course of  preemptive and covert action that they hoped would work. The flu had penetrated through our fortifications, and a can-do-decisive Dad had a battle plan of his own: Operation Chicken Soup.

Jewish Penicillin

His Mission:  intercept and render the flu inoperable.

Dad quickly mobilized and called for reinforcements.  Acute care services were  brought in immediately.

On the right flank was family physician Dr. Epstein, a proponent of biological and chemical warfare. He was at a disadvantage in utilizing the new flu vaccine, knowing, sadly, it was too late to be effective. Imposing a containment policy for Mom, he ordered enforced bed rest, plenty of liquids and Bayer aspirin.

On the left flank my grandmother Nana Sadie, who would be deployed from Manhattan the next day at 0:800. A  decorated Veteran of the Flu Epidemic of 1918 she was armed to battle the enemy the best way she knew how, arriving loaded down with shopping bags filled with cans of disinfectants and a cache of secret ingredients for her chicken soup.

Despite the fact that mid-century doctors were at the pinnacle of authority figures, my grandmother had an inherent mistrust of Doctors, being of the opinion that most of them were just a step above witch doctors.

This distrust stemmed from her childhood and her own mother. Great Grandma might say “he’s a good doctor may we never need him! You know doctors, for every one thing they tell you, there are two things hidden under the tongue.” Jewish mothers may have wanted their own sons to become doctors, but didn’t want one visiting their house.

 Ever the trooper, Mom hated being barricaded in her bedroom. Even doped up on Nyquil, she found staying in bed demoralizing, and a dereliction of duty. She had been decommissioned from household operational services and now Nana Sadie would be deputized as chief cook and bottle washer.

Dad barked orders at all of us: Were we doing all we could in combating  infectious germs. Or were we complacent, while the insurgents try to seize power.

It was all out war.

Tomorrow PT II

Copyright (©) 2018 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

Military Might garishly displayed seems so darn un-American, but in fact it’s rather retro.

While we might recoil at the idea of a Soviet style military hardware parade rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, during the Cold War Americans were far from shy about boasting and flaunting our military might. And we did it in that most American of ways – in big, bold, colorful advertisements.

“American air power has become so important that its strength or weakness can mean the difference between winning, losing ,or preventing another World War.” United Aircraft Corporation Ad 1953

These easy on the eyes advertisements found in the pages of our most popular periodicals were a veritable post war pageant of our power and prosperity, showcasing the force of Americas war machine.

New and Improved

Nestled between ads for Instant Maxwell House Coffee and  Ford Fairlanes in the latest issue of Life were lavish full-page, four-color ads for the latest fighter jet or guided missile. A veritable parade of military might could be admired from the comfort of your own Naugahyde Barca Lounger while flipping through Time Magazine.

In a marriage made in Pentagon heaven, the mad men of Madison Avenue in conjunction with the Military Industrial Complex churned out dozens upon dozens of ads in military precision during the 1950’s. These ads  served as a visual reminder of our unparalleled strength, instilling pride in our Global leadership while helping to bolster a panicked public that America was were ready to fight, protect and attack if necessary.

Defense companies like Lockheed, Grumman, and United Aircraft Corporation bloated with government contracts had no problem spending some of that cash on lavishly illustrated ads to thrill us with their latest technological marvels.

And marvel we did

Vintage ad 1954 Convair. Nuclear capacity “Guardians of Peace”

Missiles with that 100 million dollar look… new kinds of fighter jets swifter smoother  more accurate in its destruction, jets in daring new styling to capture the heart of a nation… guided missiles light years ahead of our competitors with a new kind of destruction never thought possible.

Vintage ad Sperry 1954 Time magazine

Vintage ad 1958 Chance Vought Aircraft

Vintage ad 1956 Chance Vought Aircraft

To see and experience this newness was something every American owed to his pocketbook and his heart.

Not to mention his nerves.

Cold War Jitters

“In the event of a surprise attack with today’s weapons a single bomb could wipe out a whole area.” 1955 Ad Martin

Cold war Americans had a bad case of nuclear jitters.

The threat of attack loomed large. With the Ruskies breathing down our necks  e needed protection. Fast. Fighter Jets a fast acting as Alka Seltzer.

The very thought of Soviet technological supremacy, especially military supremacy sent off a chain reaction of panic, rising fear levels and soaring defense spending. “To succeed in preventing war our Air Force Power must be strong enough to discourage aggression before it starts. This meant aircraft that are ready for retaliation,” warned an 1954 ad from United Aircraft Corporation.

We would pay any price, bear any burden to fill any Missile gap.

The thrilling new jets and missiles filled with advances and exclusive features  expressed a confidence in the future and assured a shaky nation there would indeed be a future to look forward to.

Suitable For Framing

During the Korea war Grumman proudly announced its newest turbo jet the Cougar was combat ready for fleet operation. The Cougar was an even faster swept wing successor to the famous Panther. Vintage ad Grumman 1951

Seeing American military might in vivid living color, put our cold war minds at rest, as well as justifying the enormous costs to our defense department. What a lift to the spirits when during the Korean war a reproduction of this beautiful illustration from the 1951  Grumman ad was offered to readers text-free and free of charge.

Suitable for framing, this charming testament to the fight for freedom depicting fighting jets carrying destruction to the Reds very doorstep, would be right at home in any mid-century  den. It fit so perfectly with the early American décor so popular in the smartest of suburban homes, making you the envy of your friends.

And after all isn’t that the American way?.

Copyright (©) 2018 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

Are we off on the cold war arms race again?

As the supersizing of the superpowers begins anew, let the nuclear sabre rattling begin .

With Putin boasting about his powerful invincible nuclear weapons and Trump wanting to ramp up America’s nuclear arsenal for fear we’ve fallen behind, this nuclear arsenal ambition is déjà vu. all over again.

The big chill of the cold war seems a bit too close for comfort.

Supersizing the Superpower

For those of us who grew up during the 1950’s and 1960’s the cold war culture of  an arms race  was a subtext of our lives. It was a time when most Americans assumed the Unites States and the Soviets stood continually on the brink of nuclear war.

With the threat of  nuclear attack breathing down our necks, and our misguided fear of a gaping missile gap, we needed to build up our arsenal of nuclear  weapons, pronto.

When it came to Super Powers, American’s have long  believed in supersizing.

Land of Good and Plenty

(Detail) Supersizing the Superpower collage of appropriated images by Sally Edelstein

After all, mid century American’s  were the most envied people on the planet. You couldn’t help but stand and admire us and our technological know how and might.

Running rings around all others, no other country so accented the march of new ideas. Big trends begin in America. The USA stood ever ready with a more confident answer to all the demands of modern living.

Whether bombs, breasts or Buicks, bigger was better.

The magicians of Madison Avenue were working their magic in tandem with the MAD  men of the Military Industrial Complex working double time fusing a double set of desires for the nuclear family for more weapons of mass destruction and more ease of living-  Mutually Assured Destruction and Mutually Assured Consumption.

How Do You Rate?

With more bounce and zoom in every step, we could run faster, jump higher and win more often.

And in the dawn of the space age, it was to be America, naturally, who would steer us into space braving the dangers of the cosmic frontiers, safeguarding the cause of universal peace and freedom.

Off to the Arms Race

(Detail) Supersizing the Superpower collage of appropriated images by Sally Edelstein

However, in 1957 when the Russians successfully launched Sputnik, the first man made satellite into space, we were shaken to the core. The very thought of Soviet technological supremacy in missile supremacy sent off a chain reaction of panic, ring fear levels and soaring defense spending. We would pay any price, bear any burden to fill any Missile gap.

Play Your Hunch

In the age of post war plenty, we had plenty to fear.

At a push of a button, a turn of a dial… Presto…it could all disappear if we didn’t defend them properly. It was critical to deter a nuclear war by keeping nuclear superiority. To live in peace, the cold war credo went we must have power.

Beat the Clock

( Detail) Supersizing the Superpower collage of appropriated images by Sally Edelstein

Like  contestants on the Game Show “Beat the Clock” we were thrust into an arms race with the Russians. By successfully launching a man made satellite into space, the Soviets had won the first lighting round and moved into the bonus stunts winning that challenge with the development of the ICBM.

Win Lose or Draw

Smugly the Soviets boasted: “Maybe next time will be your time to “Beat The Clock.”

Now like two contestants with fingers on the buzzer the first hot headed cold warrior to push the button- ding-ding-ding, would be “Winner Take All!” Of course in order to beat the clock we would first be playing “Break the Bank.”

Nuclear weapons both to protect and threaten became  the icons of the Cold War.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018.

It was a post war Passover plot worthy of the Russians; a cold war caper to rival anything Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cooked up.

A top-secret stolen – during the Jewish holiday of  Passover nonetheless – riveted my suburban neighborhood in the spring of 1958

Known as  Operation: Matzoh Ball  it was filled with more than matzo meal – it was loaded with espionage, scandal and treachery. The stuff of legends, this Passover plot was hotly debated over kaffeee klatches for years.  Some claimed foul ball others dismissed it as pure paranoid fantasy.

The dispute continues to this day.

Long before we worried about the infiltration of Russian bots, cold war Americans panicked about Russian spies

By the late 1950’s the cold war had congealed as quickly as a cold bowl of chicken soup.

Americans were still simmering in a brew of paranoia, fear  and suspicion when it  came to the Ruskies.   Communists were sneaky plotters – Russian  spies  could be lurking undetected right in your own backyard. Still haunted by the specter of the Rosenbergs, tried and executed for their treasonous act only a few years earlier,  remnants of the red scare still dictated the mindset of the public.

It was against this backdrop that this mid-century  matzoh ball mystery occurred.

Passover Plot

In late March of 1958 with Passover only weeks away, my mother was felled by a surprise attack of a migraine.

Since she was a teen, poor Mom suffered from migraine headaches which along with the excruciating pain made her sensitive to both light and noise. Sometimes her headaches burst upon her with a terrifying suddenness, others, like that day a bright flash of light would give her a  20 minute warning signal. No matter how much Anacin she stockpiled in her arsenal of pain relief, it was woefully inadequate in the face of this massive headache.

Manhattan Project

Bedridden and burdened with the preparation of a big family Seder looming ahead, Mom called in for reinforcements. Always on 24 hour standby, my grandmother Nana Sadie marched in from Manhattan. Loaded down with shopping bags full of holiday goodies she was prepared to do battle on the kitchen front.

A massive cooking effort began.

It wasn’t long before Nana’s rich chicken soup with its golden color  and soothing aroma  filled the house, gently wafting out the open windows for all the neighbors to savor.

But even more famous than her chicken soup, was Nana’s matzo balls which were legendary in their melt-in-your-mouth lightness and fluffiness.

Matzo balls were for my grandmother the measure of a good cook’s ability.

Her balls were always Boombeh (huge) and never Shtickels (little pieces).

Top Secret

The matzo ball recipe, handed down from her mother, my Great- Grandma Posner, was closely guarded, so top-secret, no one but Mom had access to the highly classified information.

Now access to the kitchen required security clearance, and was determined by need-to-know.

No one doubted that something dramatic had been cooking in the kitchen.

Kitchen Confidential

Her recipe was highly coveted – the manner in which she got her batter to reach those heavenly heights was strictly confidential. All the women of B’nai Brith begged her, and the Hadassah ladies tried to hondlen with her. Neighbors nagged and friends became frosty, when she refused.

Mom too, was used to the sidelong glances from the gals of Sisterhood who scrutinized, and analyzed trying to break the code for the sacred recipe. Which brand of matzo meal- Horowitz Bros.& Margareten, or Manishewitz? Maybe Streits was the secret.

Did she use Cotts Club Soda, or stiffly beaten egg whites; oil or schmaltz or, God-Forbid-butter?  No matter how hard others tried to cajole, coerce, and extract the information, their lips were sealed.

Second Rate

It rankled our neighbor, Natalie Moscowitz  especially with Passover approaching. Her matzo balls were puny, the size of golf balls and almost as hard; they had to be skewered with a fork, while digging in with a spoon to avoid shooting them out of your bowl across the table.

More than anything else, the coveted recipe had become a symbol throughout the neighborhood of  Mom’s prowess in the kitchen; those  soft, voluptuous orbs bobbing in a sea of broth, those bewitching balls, a demonstration of her religious fitness and  holiday efficiency.

As a powerful symbol of Mom’s technological might, the matzo ball recipe was ipso facto something Mrs. Moscowitz had to have.

The Outsider

As Mom regained her strength and her migraine dissipating, exchanges between my brother Andy and myself heated up. Small skirmishes continued to erupt throughout the day.

Exasperated and still sensitive to noise, Mom decided an outside, rapid response force needed to be called in to deal with us.

Mrs. Moscowitz  had helpfully suggested the services of her teenage niece Julie who lived not far away on Verona Avenue. Julie Rosensweig could be deployed on a short notice and since she had previously baby sat for us she wouldn’t need clearance.

Or so we thought.

Fowl Play

In retrospect, how were we to know that something dangerous would be entering our house undetected ? Like the sneaky Communists, treacherous decoys could infiltrate as friends and neighbors setting off a chain reaction that would reverberate for years.

It didn’t take long before Nana had proof positive that the Moscowitzes were up to no good. Someone had stolen her secret matzo ball recipe.

Within a few days there was a sudden proliferation of fluffy, light-as-air matzo balls up and down the block. Before you knew it, every neighbor would be serving Nana’s chicken soup and matzo balls for Passover.

Loose Talk Is a Chain Reaction For Espionage

Since the formula was top-secret and Nana prohibited dissemination of information about the matzo balls construction, it must have been espionage that allowed Natalie Moscowitz to penetrate our kitchen and test it. Stealing the recipe confirmed for Mom the Moscowitz’s general duplicity and untrustworthiness.

Each new disclosure, fully substantiated or not, was greeted with a kind of knowing sneer  by Mom.

On the defensive, Natalie said that to imply that she stole the recipe, would suggest that Nana Sadie was the only source of kneidel knowledge  and therefore anyone who learned to do it must have discovered the Posner’s secret formula.

But yes, Mrs. Moscowitz did in fact learn by espionage at Moms house, information about the physics of matzo balls.

A good ball has a solid central mass; the correct leavening was essential  to produce the trapped gases and ultimate release of carbon dioxide, providing the propulsion required to expel the  large amounts of energy locked up in the ball’s nucleus. The timing, and cooling period had to be carefully monitored, the density and ratio of fat to liquid to matzoh meal had to be precisely calculated.

Chain Reaction

It was Julie with her infiltration tactics, who provided specific data on the design of the Matzo Ball.

Julie’s mother, Ethel Rosensweig, a Home-Ec teacher  was a top-secret formula  breaker, who upon questioning, seemed to have substantial knowledge of the recipe.

Julie provided  Mrs. Moscowitz a good deal of information on the correct placement of ingredients most likely to start a chain reaction in order for the spheres to implode on impact resulting in  matzo balls that were Boombeh’s.

She provided a considerable packet of information including several sketches of molds that could be used to make the proper size, critical to the balls implosive core. The correct diameter was crucial; a few centimeters off in either direction, and the mission would have to be aborted.

Natalie Moscowitz found the material of inestimable significance and was willing to share it with the neighbors.

Natalie and the other neighbors disagreed for a time over whether they had allowed for sufficient compression in shaping the balls in order to produce adequate implosion. The problems were solved  and a few days before Passover they were ready to test.

Blast Off

As the balls were dropped into the scalding broth, shock waves were sent though the kitchen.

The correct trajectory of these spheres into the boiling liquid was crucial. Would the balls sink to the bottom of the chicken soup or float delicately over the surface? Did they produce floaters or sinkers?

Almost immediately, the balls themselves swelled so much they filled up the entire pot! BOOMBEH!!

Debate

Was it only through underhanded means that Mrs. Moscowitz gained the information they needed to make the delectable dumplings? Was Julie Rosensweig merely a willing patsy?

Of course both Mom and Nana had underestimated the ability of Natalie Moscowitz to gear up so quickly for the production of  perfect matzo balls for Passover. They also underestimated her talent, resources, and resourcefulness.

There was substantial evidence that Mrs. Moscowitz had keen kneidel knowledge and a research program of her own, way before Nana’s visit.

But she lacked the real know how – using crude margarine where Nana insisted on fine schmaltz.

Nana refused to believe it happened, dismissing the intelligence that indicated it had.

She tasted it to authenticate it. Despite the fact the matzo balls were the regulation two inches in diameter, light as clouds, delicately disintegrating into a fluffy mass, they had missed the critical element.

Nana Sadie smiled dismissively.

Years later I would learn the secret, handed down for generations, until finally it was my time to be entrusted with it. It wasn’t about the seltzer, the stiffly beaten egg whites or even the schmaltz.

The one ingredient you must put in everything you cook, according to Great Grandma Rebecca, is love. If you do, everything you cook will be delicious.

Only then, she claimed, would it be a “meichel for the beichel!” ( a gift for the stomach).

A Happy Passover to all my friends who celebrate it!

Copyright (©) 20018 Sally Edelstein Envisioning the American Dream All Rights Reserved -Excerpt From Defrosting The Cold War:Fallout From My Nuclear Family

For many Americans a gun represents the heart of our nation’s foundation and identity and symbol of their freedom and democracy but on this cold war creed of American rights, gun ownership was noticeably absent.

What you may ask, is more fundamental to the American Way of Life than a gun? Who could argue that gleaming AK 47 automatic rifle is a shining and powerful example of our basic rights which protect the dignity and freedom of the individual?

In fact, most would agree the right to keep and bear arms is written in stone.

Or is it?

A cold war Credo of the “American Way of Life”  that highlighted all the freedoms and rights unique to democracy didn’t deem it necessary to include gun ownership in their patriot doctrine.

This full-page color illustration that ran in Family Circle Magazine in 1956 was the visual embodiment of this Credo of democracy. In the painting set in a symbolic location that depicts George Washington and his men at Valley Forge, the Credo is emblazoned on a stone monument as though the articles had been carved on twin stones resembling the tablets of Moses.

The American Way Of Life

The creed, a summary of basic freedoms intended to distill the essence of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence was formed by a group with the hope of building greater awareness of the value of the American Way of Life and improving the understanding of the American Constitution and Bill of Rights at a time when they felt Americans took their freedom for granted.

Curiously enough this Credo with nary a mention of the right to bear arms was not produced by some left leaning liberal group bit by an ultra-conservative organization called the Freedom Foundation.

Freedom Foundation

Formed in 1949 this pro-American, patriotic group could boast a roster of illustrious founders. Hoping to continuously sell the American system to the people during the Cold War, the Credo was cooked up by ad man Don Belding, financier E.F. Hutton with major support from Dwight Eisenhower. As a bulwark against Communism the Credo would help promote responsible citizenship, character, and freedom. And Capitalism.

Each article of the Credo was brief and easy to understand; some were obviously drawn from the Bill of Rights (like “Right to free speech and press” and “Right to assemble”), while others had an economic bent (like “Right to bargain with our employers”).

The words of the Credo  “have been sifted, revised and approved by many great statesmen, industrialists’ jurists and historians,” and has “has been endorsed by over 200 chief and associate justices of state supreme courts.”

Yet it is noteworthy the second amendment which has today taken center stage in our national dialogue was not even worth mentioning in this credo.

Mainstream America

Far from a fringe group the Freedom Foundation gained national media attention distributing more than a quarter billion copies of the Credo by the mid 1950’s.

The Credo was reproduced on magazine covers and for decades celebrities like John Wayne and Bob Hope joined the star-spangled wagon train promoting the foundation’s Americanism on radio and TV spots.

In the cold war climate of 1956 it’s not surprising that Family Circle was proud to devote ten pages to the Freedom Foundation Credo and its patriotic principles.

Own a Piece Of Democracy

The monument was still an artist’s rendering and the Foundation was eagerly looking for donations to build its monument in Valley Forge.

A full color enlargement of the Credo illustration by artist Isa Barnett was offered to the reader for the first time ever, and would be “a perfect addition for your home, school, office church or club.”

Democracy in Five Easy Pieces

“The Credo, the accompanying article explained “brings together a series of short, simple, easily understood propositions derived from our great heritage of citizens’ rights and freedoms. All of the Credo rights fall into easily remembered groups, under five headings.

“Here and on the following pages are pictures that capture the essence of our rights as free men- rights that are not common in the world of 1956, although we who enjoy democracy may take them for granted.”

At a time when it seems the Trump presidency has accelerated the decline in democracy, it is worth reviewing our cherished rights.

Protection

Rights of Protection – Right to Petition for Grievances; Right of habeas corpus-no excessive bail; Right to trial by jury-innocent till proven guilty

“Our democratic form of government protects our individual rights by giving specific courses of action to invoke when necessary.

“General of the Army Omar Bradley says: “I feel that a monument to freedom…will stand as an American symbol of our pledge to the world that we will eternally serve in this cause…The Freedom Shrine project will place upon imperishable stone – for all to see –the mighty concepts of freedom and liberty which mark the American way of life.

Freedom Foundation – in sponsoring this project-is giving a symbol to the world of the most powerful weapon in this global fight against tyranny – a monument to the principles of freedom… In addition to serving as the arsenal of democracy, we must remember that we are also regarded as the arsenal of hope.

Sadly today we have relinquished our roles as beacons of democracy. America’s global reputation for personal freedom has taken a beating as has our prestige. Trump and his minions  have quietly been dismantling our protections we have fought for since FDR’s New Deal.

Government

Govrnment- Right to free elections and personal secret ballot; Right to the service of government as a protector and a referee; Right to freedom from arbitrary government regulation and control.

“To secure our personal rights, our identity, we must establish and participate in the kind of government that guarantees our rights to us.

Shown here are some of the many ways all of us enjoy our rights of self-government. The Freedom Shrine will restate these rights in simple terms to remind Americans of fundamental principles

President Dwight Eisenhower, on contributing the first dime to the Freedom Shrine said: “ Thus we will show the world our nations fundamental belief in God, our constitutional government  designed to serve  and not to rule the America people, and our indivisible bundle of personal, political and economic rights…

Identity

Identity- Right to Worship God in one’s own way; Right to free speech and press; Right to move about freely at home and abroad; Right to Assemble

Those personal rights that allow individuals to establish the identity that is unique in every human being.

Ownership

Ownership- Right to privacy in our homes; Right to contract about our affairs; Right to own private property

“Grouped here are the Credo rights that entitle us to have property and enjoy full ownership of it- our homes, fields, businesses and all the other possessions that help make life comfortable and secure.

Property has always been dear to men because it is a bulwark against distress for them and their loved ones.

We have only to look at countries where these rights are not enjoyed and compare our conditions with that of the deprived, to rededicate ourselves to preserving our bundle of freedoms – of which these three give us such rich benefits

Enterprise

Enterprise- Right to work in callings and localities of our choice; Right to bargain for goods and services in a free market; Right to go into business, compete, make a profit; Right to bargain with our employers and employees

“As citizens of democracy we are privileged to express our individuality through creative work and to enjoy its satisfactions. Because our form of government encourages individual initiative and imagination we enjoy full freedom to translate our work into enterprise.

Pictured here are Americans enjoying their precious rights that relate to enterprise: rights we must remind ourselves, that disappear under a totalitarian regime.”

“As citizens of democracy we are privileged to express our individuality through creative work and to enjoy its satisfactions. Because our form of government encourages individual initiative and imagination we enjoy full freedom to translate our work into enterprise.

Pictured here are Americans enjoying their precious rights that relate to enterprise: rights we must remind ourselves, that disappear under a totalitarian regime.”

 

Democracy Now

Those words directed against the fear of cold war totalitarianism, ring just as eerily familiar today.

The Credo was formed with the fear that the freedom of America’s citizens was gravely at risk, not only from the threat of communism but because Americans took their freedom for granted.

Today while the spot light on gun rights as an attack on our freedom seems to outshine all other rights, many of our basic rights are already being infringed on.

The foundation on which the monument stood was the words “Constitutional Government designed to Serve the People.”

If our democracy is slowly eroding, we must pay attention to who is being served .

Copyright (©) 20018 Sally Edelstein Envisioning the American Dream All Rights Reserved

After WWII, my future husband and his family of Holocaust survivors lingered in an overcrowded Displaced Persons Camp in Germany waiting for a country that would accept them as politicians and a fear mongering media debated the loyalty of Eastern Europeans and the fear of Communist infiltration. My 2-year-old husband to-be in a DP Camp 1947 photo: family collection

I married a refugee who as a little boy was perceived as a threat to Cold War America and not as a survivor of the Holocaust.

While my childhood was a sugar frosted world of frost-free fun living out the post war suburban dream, my husband would spend the first four years of his life in a displaced persons camp, while Congress bickered unwilling to change existing restrictive immigration laws that severely limited the number of Eastern European allowed.

Was he any more of a threat to our country than a Migrant Central American or  Syrian refugee child is today?

Steeped in fear, some Americans have a habit of marking an entire people as predisposed to disloyalty.

Tragically one sits in the oval office today, wielding a mighty presidential pen issuing out executive orders grossly affecting the lives of millions and tarnishing America’s moral authority. His presidential policy is to appeal to his base with racially motivated attacks on immigrants.

When it comes to American paranoia, Donald Trump’s fear based, fear driven policy aimed at the other feels eerily familiar.

A Threat to America

Fear mongering media and xenophobic politicians cry out in protest at the possible influx of refugees seeking a safe haven.

Squawking like Chicken Little, they ominously warn of the dire consequences and threat to America if we allow “these tired, these poor, these huddled masses” of refugees ‘yearning to breathe free” into our homeland.

The Other

These particular refugees they assert “are supporters of terrorism, violence and the abrogation of American laws and ideals…they will take over the country and subvert our constitution.”

“Taking in these refugees would be suicide for the US because anti-American terrorists may be disguising themselves as refugees.”

A lawmaker opposing these immigrants claims they are “imbued with political ideologies wholly at variance with our constitutional system!”

Testimony before Congress offered grave warnings that these refugees were “important carriers of the kind of ideological germs with which it is their aim to infect the public opinion of the US.”

Now that certainly sounds like a diagnosis from the good doctor, Ben Carson.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

“Is this Tomorrow?” A panel from the 1947 anti communist comic book designed to teach people about the subversive nature of communism.

Only the speaker here was not directing his paranoia at the fear of a Muslim terrorist sneaking into the U.S. along with the Syrian refugees or a dangerous MS-13 gang member from fraudulently sneaking in by applying for asylum.

These remarks were uttered over 65 years ago about another group of refugees seeking asylum, East European refugees.

This fear mongering claiming national security that sounds straight out of the Trump racist playbook on Central American refugees, is actually a page from the cold war anti-communist rhetoric directed at the displaced persons of WWII.

The current policy of blocking refugees fleeing a violent homeland desperate to seek a safe haven, mirrors the deep freeze experienced by displaced placed Eastern European Jews  during the cold war whose efforts to get to a safe haven were met by a cold shoulder.

The cold war cast a particularly chilly response to the desperate plight of the displaced person of Europe due to our heightened fear of Communist infiltration.

Thanks to the peddling of irrational fears to a panicked and paranoid public, many post war Americans were resistant to the idea of welcoming these poor souls to our shores.

Displaced Fears

Displaced Persons in a DP Camp, Germany 1947The conventional wisdom that we immediately opened our shores with outstretched arms to these displaced persons has become a more romanticized version of the truth; the harsh edges of their struggle to enter the land of the free have softened over the past 70 years.

Liberated Jews suffering from illness and exhaustion emerged from concentration camps and hiding places to discover a world which had no place for them.

Well into the post war years, thousands of European Jews remained locked in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria. Without a home, many were afraid to be repatriated because their countries were now police states under Soviet occupation.

For these ¼ million stateless, homeless Jewish survivors, prospects for resettlement in free democratic lands appeared uncertain.

These huddled masses yearning to be free had nowhere to go.

It is a story that hits close to home.

My future in-laws were Holocaust survivors.

1945 No Where to Go

Strong national prejudices, procrastination in Congress and some less than dynamic leadership in White House combined to prolong the miseries of Jews who survived the Holocaust.

All over Europe after the war ended in May of 1945,  like a great backwash to the tidal wave of war, almost 10,000,000 confused, depleted and hungry human beings were wandering from place to place amidst the rubble of war. Some were newly liberated labor slaves, some concentration camp survivors,  some civilians, some prisoners of war.

Trudging on foot, hitching rides on bicycles,  looted German cars, trucks, and hay wagons this stumbling mass of humanity moved steadily on urged on the idea to get home.

For many there was no longer a home.

Many survivors who went home faced hostility from their neighbors and found their homes, possessions and jobs gone.

These huddled masses yearning to be free had nowhere to go.

It is a story that hits close to home.

My future in-laws were Holocaust survivors.

Displaced Persons

Braving the incertitude among history’s most jumbled mass of migration was a courageous young Jewish woman grown older than her 23 years through the unspeakable horrors that no one should ever bear witness to.

Her entire family lost at the hands of the Nazis, separated from her husband, she trudged on with her meager belongings tightly clutching her most valued possession, her precious newborn baby.

Lost Family 1937 Photo: family collection

This tiny baby boy, born without a home, who would never know what it was to grow up with grandparents, uncles or aunts would one day grow up to be my future all-American husband.

Bereft of home and family, tattered photos were the few remaining mementos many had. Polish Jews 1930s. Vintage photo from family collection

Unable to return to her now vanished hometown in Poland, reunited with her husband, they found their way to a displaced persons camp in Germany.

DP camps were made from abandoned German army barracks, factories and even concentration camps. Most of these camps were crowded and unsanitary with shortages of food and clothing

Before the end of 1945, more than 6 million of those uprooted by the war found a home leaving 1.5 to 2 million displaced persons. Most Jewish survivors were unable or unwilling to return home because of persistent anti-Semitism and the destruction of their communities during the Holocaust. Many of those who did return feared for their lives. In postwar Poland, for example, there were a number of violent riots that claimed scores of Jewish lives.

The big question was where to put the people who could not be repatriated?

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor

“You’re a Cheap Bunch of Soreheads and You Can’t Land Here,” says a bloated Uncle Sam in cartoonist Art Young’s protest against discriminatory immigration laws. This editorial cartoon appeared in “The Masses” the radical, socialist magazine that attacked the status quo.

Restrictive immigration policies were still in effects in the U.S. and legislation to expedite the admission of Jewish DPs was slow. These constricting immigration policies had at least a partial basis in anti-Semitism and racist theories, thanks to immigration laws passed between 1882 and 1929 that were among the most discriminatory in the world, regulating immigration by race.

Despite loosening of some quota restrictions, by the end of the year opportunities for legal immigration to the United States remained extremely limited.

Congressional action was needed before existing immigration quotas could be increased, so while Congress procrastinated and bickered, my husband would spend the first four of his life in a DP camp looking for a country that would accept him.

A Tarnished Golden Door

These Jews did not receive the welcome promised in the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty “I lift my lamp beside the Golden door.” In the years following the end of the war, the lamp was dimmed, the door too often closed.

A Cold War Chill

Many were convinced that Communists had infiltrated DP camps posing as refugees in order to enter the country where they would soon overthrow the government. All were suspect including this homeless little boy on the left who would one day grow up to be my husband. Did I marry a communist ? Not in the least. (L) My 3-year-old husband in a DP Camp 1948 photo family collection (R) 1949 movie poster “I Married a Communist”

Cast in a cold war light, these refugees became even less desirable.

Part of that opposition was fueled, as it is now, by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this case Communism.

By the beginning of 1947, the composition of the DP camps had changed.

The camps were very overcrowded due to the daily influx of Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing oppressive Soviet occupation. 250,000 Eastern European Jews including large numbers of families and children from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Soviet Union joined the other displaced persons of the Holocaust.

As my husband and his family lingered in an overcrowded DP camp waiting for a country that would accept them, politicians and a fear mongering media debated the loyalty of Eastern Europeans and the fear of communist infiltration.

Warning! Danger Ahead

An anti-communist comic book warning young readers of the dangers ahead should Uncle Sam steer clear of the Rd Iceberg

By 1947 relations between the Soviet Union and U.S. were in the deep freeze; the cold war was frozen solid.

In the black and white cold war world war of good vs evil, America was certain that the communists were waging an aggressive campaign of hatred against us embarking upon an aggressive campaign to destroy free government and the American Way of life.

from the 1947 anti communist comic book “Is This Tomorrow?” warning people of the subversive nature of Communist infiltration

Uncle Sam was convinced that Russia was hell-bent on destroying the traditional American way of Life and had their cunning communist eyes set on infiltrating America with whatever means they could.

Germ War Fare

American feared being infected with a good case of communism. (R) Is This Tomorrow a 1947 comic book designed to teach people about the subversive nature of communist infiltration.

The very health of democracy was at stake, unless these morally corrupting influences were wiped out and banned from our shores.

More frightening than polio was the spread of that ideological virus communism.

And the displaced persons camps were prime breeding grounds for this subversive cunning germ.

The president of the National Economic Council testified in Congress that the DPs were “important carriers of the kind of ideological germs with which it is their aim to infect the public opinion of the U.S. ”

It was a virulent strain of ideology that once exposed, there was no cure. We needed to quarantine the public from the spread of this dangerous virus.

Crafty subversive plotters training for their roles as peddlers of Soviet propaganda, skillfully disguise themselves as refugees in a DP camp 1947 . Photo family collection

Just as germs entered the bloodstream undetected so Communists could infiltrate and attack. “Skillfully disguising themselves as refugees,” one article warned, “carrying out their mission these communists spend years in training for their subversive roles, poised to slip in a neat hypodermic needle full of Moscow virus.”

In a DP camp in Germany a group of Junior revolutionaries plotting for seizure and power in the USA. Photo- family collection

Many were convinced Communists had infiltrated the DP camps, posing as refugees in order to enter the country where they would soon overthrow the government.

People testified in Congress that the Soviets had placed “trained terrorists’ ( trained at terrorists institutions in Moscow) in the DP camps .

Is that a concealed weapon in that snow ball? A 2 year old displaced child in DP camp Germany. Photo Family collection

It was  therefore likely that many DP camps admitted from Europe would include a number of these terrorists. Alarmists feared that DPs were Soviet “Trojan Horses bent on the nations destruction.”

Natural Tendencies

As a reflection of their “natural tendencies” the perceived politics of the displaced person’s thus posed a threat to American nation.

Many Congressmen opposed DP immigration equating these “New Immigrants” with anarchism, communism and Bolshevism, recklessly claiming the DPs were “imbued with political ideologies wholly at variance with our constitutional system of government.”

Who Can You Trust

What it boiled down to was loyalty and trust calling in to question the loyalty of immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Marking an entire people as pre disposed to disloyalty is a familiar refrain.

Once here, the DP’s ( from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe) would be “peculiarly susceptible to the absorption of socialistic propaganda” and naturally gravitate into “left wing unions” and the immigrant slums which were “mothers of revolution.”

Opponents of DP immigration often spoke of how the DPs and the “ideological germs” that they carried would weaken the nation from within, echoing fears of “race suicide” that had been so prevalent in debates about immigration earlier in the century.

1948 Displaced Persons Act

However as time went on President Harry Truman stood up against the public opinion and Congress in his battle to open the door of the U.S. to Jewish DPs. He urged Congress to enact legislation that would admit thousands of homeless and suffering refugees of all faiths to the U.S.

After pressure, Congress passed the less than magnanimous 1948 Displaced Person Act ( an act to authorize for a limited time the admission into the U.S. 200,00 of certain European displaced persons) which was highly selective using date restrictions designed to limit the number of Jewish refugees eligible for entry.

President Truman when he signed it, grudgingly admitted it was better than nothing, but called it “flagrantly discriminatory” against Jews and Catholics. 1

Change of Heart

Many began seeing the propaganda potential of DPs that could be exploited and that they be touted through the U.S. as “Victims of Communism.”

As more refuges were being admitted, a cold war re-branding of the DPs began to take hold. In the war against communism they could use their plight to our advantage.

One document  suggested a technique for fighting Communism in the USA strongly recommending “that the propaganda potential of DPs be exploited and that they be touted through the U.S. as Victims of Communism.”

The obvious fact that the DP’s who might technically be able to return to their East European homelands refused to do so because of feared Communist rule, had somehow previously eluded them.

Many folks began to realize that far from destroying the nation from within, the politics of the DPs especially their anti-communist feelings could strengthen the nation in its conflict with the Soviet Union.

For many of the proponents of DP immigration, the DPs did not represent the communist contagion but rather the anti-communism inoculation.

They would be living proof of the terrors and horrors of Communist rule.

In its final report the USDPC urged the resettlement of refugees from communist tyranny should become part of Cold War U.S. Strategy.

These displaced persons served to remind us of the dangers of totalitarian communism!

Post Script

Coming to America 1949 Photo family collection

In the fall of 1949 a few months before a relatively unknown senator from Wisconsin began his 4 year witch hunt for Communists, my future husband and what remained of his family arrived in the states from their DP camp in Germany.

After a ten-day crossing from Bremerhaven, Germany, the ship steamed into NY Harbor. On board were other displaced persons some were survivors of concentration camps others refugees from Russian persecution.

Some were so old that they had little to look forward to except burial at last in American earth; others like my husband, so young that soon they would have no recollection at all of Europe. But all of them felt grateful to the country that had finally given them a safe haven.

Only 4 years old, Hersh who had spent almost all his life behind barbed wire was able to adjust quickly, learning phrases that would take his parents months to learn.

His first experience here was watching Hop Along Cassidy on TV. This little 4 year boy who could only speak Yiddish donned a cowboy hat and learned the language watching good old American westerns.

As his parents watched him change from a displaced person with a number into an American, they beamed with happiness.

Today this former unwanted refugee is an attorney defending those most in need of help, whose eloquence owed a lot to those 1950s cowboy and the generosity of America for welcoming him.

1. Note: So much criticism was heaped on the 1948 Act that Congress later passed amendments extending allotment of US immigration visas for DPs to approximately 500,000.
The 1950 revision succeeded including treating all European refugees “equally as members of the human race” as the NY Times said in an editorial at the time.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriat

It was  July 4, 1955. The cold war was frozen solid.

Never were American dreams more potent or more seductive than in Cold War America when the USA stood united and confident in our role as leader of the Free World.

It would soon be my first Independence Day and my parents believed it was time for its littlest citizen to be introduced to her Uncle Sam and  “My America.”

What better place to be inculcated with truth, justice and the American way than at an honest to goodness Fourth of July parade.

Like most American  children I would be  inoculated with a strong dose of Americanism which if administered at an early age would build up your immunity to any opposing belief system.

That year, the theme of our local parade was the celebration of The Four Freedoms.

All across Long Island, residents were a buzz over the fact that our towns parade was being co-sponsored  by those Cold War crusaders of truth from “The Crusade For Freedom”.

Cold War Crusaders of Truth

Vintage Ad Radio Free Europe Truth Dollar Campaign 1955

The Crusade, was a privately funded donation drive that raised “truth dollars” to support Radio Free Europe, the radio station that broadcast news and current affairs to the enslaved people behind the Iron Curtain.

In the black and white cold war world of us vs them, we were convinced that the Russians were hell-bent on destroying  freedom and the American way of life and it would be up to us to contain them.

Who Can You Trust

WWII Soviet Allies (L) Life Magazine cover 3/29/43 featuring warm and fuzzy Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin (R) Life magazine cover 2/12/45 featuring our brave ally a Soviet Soldier courageously driving on to Berlin

Like so many war born marriages it turned out our grand alliance during WWII  with the Soviets was more a marriage of convenience and our relations had turned frosty.

As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet, the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazis had been seamlessly and swiftly rerouted to those Godless Russians Commies, uniting our country once again.

Uncle Sam was certain that the Communists were not only concealing the truth but were waging a campaign of hatred against us and our peaceful, decent motives.

They were weaving fantastic stories and twisted facts about America unlike in our country where the government told us the truth.

Truth as clear and undistorted as the perfect picture you were promised on your new Philco television set.

True picture, no blur, no distortion, that was the American Way.

Cold Facts

(L) Vintage Book The Soviet Image of the United States A Study in Distortion by Frederick C. Barghoorn Co. 1950 Harcourt, Brace & Company
The book claims that “Soviet propaganda against the United States is one of the main instruments of the Kremlin’s aggressive foreign policy Moscow, building the worlds greatest war machine, is seeking to turn world opinion against the US by accusing America of crimes against humanity of which itself is guilty>”

By exposing the calculated lies that Communists were spreading, and promoting the American way of Life, Radio Free Europe became a vital strategy in winning the Cold War.

The Crusade For Freedom had aired public service announcements on the radio all week leading up to the parade, as well as advertisements in all the papers.

“Every hour, every day, millions hear no other version but hating America”  Dad read aloud from a full-page ad in the NY Times, paid for by the Crusade and their Truth dollars. “The unfortunate people behind the iron curtain are fed a steady diet of lies and misstatements and the poor people are made to swallow that poison”.

Sugar Coated Goodness

Dad wanted us to realize how vital Radio Free Europe was.

As my brother mindlessly popped fistfuls of sugar crisps into his mouth -for breakfast its dandy, for snacks it’s so handy or eat like candy:  Dad tried to explain :“Just as mom feeds us wholesome good food, we needed to feed the poor people behind the iron curtain the good nourishing truth”.

America was not only the greatest nation in the world it was the very embodiment of freedom, democracy and progress.

With my made- in- the- USA regulation rattle in one hand and my National Dairy Council issued bottle of milk in the other I was ready to to be inducted into Uncle Sam’s service and pledge my allegiance to the land of the Free.

A Russian controlled puppet placed in the White house was the stuff of Cold war paranoia and pop culture

Joseph Stalin must be grinning in his grave.

Putin has done what the Soviets long dreamed of accomplishing.

Once the stuff of cold war paranoia, spy novels and movies, the Russians have infiltrated our democracy and put a puppet in the White House.

After today’s summit in Helsinki, Trump has made it clear  who is pulling his strings – Donald Trump belongs to Moscow. Not only has Trump divided the U.S. and Western Europe, the President of the United States sided with Russia against  his own intel agencies when it came to proof of Russia’s meddling in our elections and their attempts to undermine American democracy.

Donald Trump: “My people came to me, (DNI) Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this:  I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

The accusations of Russia’s interference in our presidential election has sent a big chill down my spine, as childhood memories of the Cold War are quickly defrosted. The terror of the Red Menace infiltrating our country is brought back and is chillingly familiar.

It is a familiar cold war doomsday scenario brought into the 21st century.

Red Menace

The fear of Russian intervention, not only militarily but politically was a common thread throughout my mid-century childhood. American’s were convinced hidden communists were lurking everywhere, secretly infiltrating our government, including our very own state department.

Like those two scheming cartoon villains Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale those no goodnick spies carrying out Fearless Leaders secret evil plots, Russians were sinister, sneaky plotters carrying out covert actions  just waiting to overthrow a government…including our own.

Russian Menace

Now that evidence mounts that the  Russians stole the White House  for Donald Trump, the candidate handpicked by Comrade Putin, it is a scenario eerily straight out of the any number of post war cautionary tales.

Even the techniques they used, misinformation and manipulation of the press, creating divisiveness while pitting citizens against each other to weaken us,  are the exact same devices we were warned  were favored by  the Soviets  to undermine us:

“His aim is to make you hate your fellow-man and keep you blind to the important things in life. He wants to make you forget the importance of your right to vote as you please—to say what you please—to go where you please.”

Is This Tomorrow?

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

One famous 1947 comic book entitled “Is This Tomorrow – America Under Communism” was an over the top tale typical of the time  alerting us of the dangers of a Russian takeover. Over 48 colorful pages it illustrated   just how easy it would be for the Reds to take over the U.S.

File this under Truth is Stranger Than Comic Fiction Department.

It Can’t Happen Here:

The comic opens with a dire warning to the young reader:

IS THIS TOMORROW is published for the one purpose – TO MAKE YOU THINK! To make you more alert to the menace of Communism. “Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

Taking their orders directly from Moscow, the story revolves around a group of American Communists led by  a man named “Jones” and his propaganda advisor “Brown” a sinister Steve Bannon character who explains how they will manipulate the American media as a precursor to their Kremlin approved takeover of the U.S.

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

They manipulate strike leaders, and stoke racial, class and religious hatred to help weaken America for the Communists eventual takeover.

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

Race baiting and taking advantage of the things that divided this country worked to their advantage.

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

After the plot to assassinate the president and vice president is successful, the party operatives  have successfully infiltrated the  government  and Jones controls the Speaker of the House (who now is the new president ). Behind the scenes Jones  becomes the”Chief Advisor” and expands the Executive Powers.

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

Destabilizing journalism as a check on the power of government is quickly implemented. Anyone critical is swiftly punished and unfavorable newspapers are denied newsprint until they agree with the party line. Telephone system and radio network are now nationalized.

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947

INCREDIBLE?

“Did our story seem incredible? It is unbelievable—that such a small group could ever dream of enforcing its will upon the majority. But remember that a group for smaller than the number of Communists living and working in America today seized control of Russia in 1917.

No one can refuse to believe what he knows to be true. And we do know that every method shown in this presentation has been used by the Communists in their rise to power in other countries. Starvation, murder, slavery, force—those are the tools the Communists use to carry out the doctrine of Communism.

The Communists are preparing to seize control of America in any crisis. This crisis, real or contrived—will be there signal to move in… and make their bid for power.

This crisis might begin with a flood in Pennsylvania—a drought in the Middle West. Or it might begin with a general strike in some of our large industrial cities—New York—Detroit—Chicago—San Francisco.

It happened in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and country after country, the world over.

WHERE DO YOU COME IN?

You are the one with whom the Communist is struggling right now. His aim is to make you hate your fellow man and keep you blind to the important things in life. He wants to make you forget the importance of your right to vote as you please—to say what you please—to go where you please—to worship as you please. The Communist really wants you to forget all your rights to individual freedom and liberty.

But you cannot assume your individual rights without assuming individual responsibility.

If you want to keep on living, you must know who the Communists are—and their methods of working. You must recognize the Communist Party line in action and separate Communist propaganda from the factual news of the day.

You are on the defensive in this battle. You owe it to yourself to know all about the invader. He knows more about you than you suspect.

Laughable  for its inplausibility, it’s not quite so funny now.

Are the Russians coming? It look like they are already here.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

“Stretch out your hand in brotherhood, open your heart in compassion.”

Just like my own Jewish family, White House senior advisor Steven Miller’s family was the beneficiary of immigration policies  that his own administration is working so hard to undo.

Trump may be unhinged but Steven Miller is clearly unmoored, especially when it comes to his own family roots.

Like many Jewish Americans, Steven Miller is from a family of immigrants and refugees who desperately came to this country escaping anti Jewish pograms.

But unlike most Jewish Americans who feel a deep sense of obligation to help the next generation of  refugees, Steven Miller is Trump’s architect of his draconian immigration  policy.

Miller is a disgrace to America and a disgrace to the Jews.

Even Miller’s uncle has recently written a scathing editorial eviscerating his black sheep nephew calling him a “immigration hypocrite.”

Jews and Jewish organizations have longed stepped up, no more so than after WWII when the displaced, homeless Jews of Europe faced another crisis in their bitter struggle to survive.

I feel proud that my own family stepped up and opened their hearts in compassion when it was called for..

The Jewish Question

In the late 1940’s anti-semitism was a prevalent attitude in the US.

Refugees from the Holocaust were not welcomed here with open arms

In Congress, antisemitism was an explaining factor in the common hostility towards refugee immigration and anti-semitism explains Congress’s action that blocked all likely havens of refugee for the Jews before the War and were slow to change.

Part of that hostility was fueled – as some grievances are now- by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this case communism.

United Jewish Appeal – Call to Action

While Congress cooled their heels, charitable organizations stepped up, none more so than the United Jewish Appeal.

The UJA appeal was unprecedented.

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that had started helping Diplaced persons  in 1945 was saddled with limited resources and inadequate to cope with the tremendous need.

A major campaign by the United Jewish Appeal organized in 1946 to help the Jewish Displaced Persons set in motion the most massive reconstruction and immigration program in Jewish history.

It was a challenge to American Jews to help survivors.

Along with thousands of others who answered the humanitarian call, my own family opened their hearts in compassion to help, never knowing that in decades to come this saga would touch their own family.

A Moral Obligation – It’s a Family Affair

Winter 1946. (L) While my mothers Manhattan family vacationed in Miami Beach , (R) my husband and his family spent the winter in a DP Camp in Germany.

On a snowy February afternoon in 1946 while my future in-laws scrounged for food in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, bartering cigarettes and chocolate for fresh meat and milk my own beloved grandmother Sadie sat in the warm comfort of the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, one of a several hundred women attending the opening rally of The Woman’s Division of the UJA, the United Jewish Appeal  of Greater NY.

Seated at snowy white linen covered tables festooned with silver plated urns filled with Herbert Tareyton cigarettes, they waited silently, somberly sipping tea and nibbling lighter than air angel food cake in anticipation of the featured speaker Mrs Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We…You…Are  Their Only Hope

These ladies had gathered together to embark on the greatest drive to raise money for the Jewish Refugees , part of The UJA’s recently launched $100,000,000 nation wide drive.

Eleanor Roosevelt the guest speaker had just recently come from visiting 4 DP camps and movingly shared her experience of the indescribable pain and suffering she witnessed.

Looking out at the packed ballroom of that grand hotel filled with well-heeled and well-intentioned ladies, a veritable sea of bobbing Lilly Dache chapeau, a profusion of ranch mink and Persian Lamb coats redolent of Shalimar and Joy, the former First lady firmly implored : We cannot live in an island of prosperity in a sea of human misery,

These smartly dressed ladies in their Hattie Carnegie dresses who now lived in large limestone apartments that lined the grand Avenues  of the Upper West Side of N.Y. gave her a standing ovation.

“These are Your Brothers and Sister Who Speak…”

Nearly all these women were once Eastern Europeans themselves, or had come from those who had made the odyssey, suffered from dislocation, confusion, fear, loss of what they knew.

All looking for a better life.

Many of these same women knew first hand the Cossack’s on horseback that had driven their people from their homes, the laws that had prevented them from owning land, living where they wanted, getting an education.

They knew that even here, in this new land where they had prospered because prosperity was what America had to offer, they were still despised for being themselves, for being Jews. So they knew the only way to survive was with your people and to care for them.

That it was the obligation of American Jews to contribute generously to relieve the suffering of the surviving Jews of Europe was never in question.

The UJA ran a series of emotion laden ads asking for help, such as the one above.

“Give them Life and Make it Worth Living”

These are your sister and brothers who speak.
Praying that their liberation from Nazi tyranny shall not be turned into a mockery by the worlds indifference. Praying that now, after years of torture and death and a miserable existence in displaced persons camps they be helped to rebuild their lives.

By 1947 the need was greater.

The Jewish population of the DP camps has tripled in one year. From 85,000 at the beginning of 1946 to 250,00 in 1947.

Resources were depleted.

Not only were US Quotas  still in place against the Jews there was an organized campaign against permitting the entrance of displaced persons into the U.S. with President Truman’s mail 7 to 1 against admission.

Many nations shared the shame of the US in having refused sanctuary to stateless Jewish survivors following WWII.

Efforts to get them into Palestine faced great odds. Great Britain continued to strictly limit the number of Jews allowed in Palestine. Jews already living in British-controlled Palestine organized “illegal” immigration by ship. In 1947 the British forced the ship Exodus 47 which was carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors headed for Palestine, to return to Germany where the passengers were again imprisoned in camps.

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration set to expire that June placed greater burdens on the agencies of the UJA.

The  massive campaign continued running ad campaigns in the popular magazines.

Could You Refuse Them If They Stood Before You?

The plaintive question asked in  this 1947 UJA ad went straight to the heart:

“Could you look into the sad proud eyes of this girl and say, No child I will not help you?

Could you bear to hear the sobs of this frightened boy without wanting to draw him into the warm shelter of your s arms?
There are thousands more like these 2…children who have survived Hitlers plan for their extermination. Sad, hungry terrified children who need your help.

They have seen sights no child should ever see. They have known terror we in America cannot even imagine. Before they had a chance to be young, their hearts grew old. Their souls are wounded in a way that only understanding people like you can heal.

They need everything. Food clothes and medicine just to keep them alive. The need homes and guidance. They need education and training for useful lives in Palestine the US or some other hospitable land.

But most of all they need what all people need…faith in their fellow beings, hope for the future.

We in America…you in your comfortable living room..it is us they look for help. We…you…are their only hope.

It was a moral obligation then, it is a moral obligation now.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

You cannot value too highly your right to vote.

It is the American Way.

In the midst of the cold war, Metropolitan  Life Insurance  ran an ad encouraging Americans to embrace their  God-given American right to vote, a privilege not given to those behind the iron curtain of Communism.

It was thought essential to emphasize The American Way of Life by contrasting it with those Godless Communists.

What was more fundamentally American than the right to vote?

A simple  curtain of cloth- not iron or bamboo- is a symbol of our liberties.

It helps to protect the right to vote privately and freely.

By voting we reaffirm our faith in the American form of government and make our voices heard in matters affecting the preservation of our heritage and way of life.

To vote is a right and a privilege…and a responsibility

To vote intelligently is a duty.

It still is.

Of course in 1952 when this ad ran, the privilege to vote did not really extend to all Americans.  That curtained voting booth wasn’t  open to all. This most basic right of a citizen in a democracy was often denied to African-American citizens.

Voter suppression of a minority was also part of our  American heritage.

It still is.

Civil Rights advocates protesting discriminatory voting laws in 1964 ( AP Photo/Bob Daugherty)

Despite the 14th and 15th amendments guaranteeing the civil rights of Black Americans, their right to vote was systemically taken away by white supremacist state government well into the 1950’s and beyond.

That was their way of preserving “their heritage.”

States found ways to circumvent the Constitution and prevent Blacks from voting. Poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation all turned down African-Americans from voting.

Sadly this too is part of the “American Way.”

“As citizens of the US you cannot value too highly your right to vote.” So begins a vintage booklet directed specifically “to colored men of voting age in our southern states.”

This pamphlet “What a Colored Man Should Do to Vote” from the early 1900’s outlines the voting regulations in 13 states in the South. It also offers general advice on the voting process including an appeal for African-American Voters to be on “friendly terms” with their white neighbors so they could discuss common needs.

It sums up the requirements of each southern state:

You must pay your poll tax, you must register and hold your certificate of registry. In some states if you cannot read or write you can register if you own $300 worth of property.

In other states in order to register you must be able to read and write any article of the Constitution of the U.S. and must be regularly engaged in some employment the greater part of the year before election.

Any person convicted of felony, adultery, larceny, wife-beating, miscegenation, vagrancy, selling his vote is forever barred from voting.

Voting is  part of the American heritage

So is voter disenfranchisement.

Still.

It is our duty to vote

It is also our duty to prevent voter suppression.

Let’s right the right to vote.

Once upon a time, but not that long ago, America was the world’s peacekeeper. We stood at the apex of power, united as a country, and our commitment to our Allies absolute. Our word was our bond.

For those too young to remember, this is not a fairy tale. This was the American Way for 70 years.

Our current foreign policy is totally foreign to me.

As it apparently is to Defense Secretary James Mattis who resigned a day after Trump’s surprise plan to withdraw troops from Syria, livid at what he views as a betrayal  of the Kurds who had allied with the U.S. and now must fend for themselves.

Once upon a time we treated our allies with respect.

“One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships,” Mattis  wrote in his resignation letter.

While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.

The retired four star general didn’t hide his feelings concerning Trump’s dangerous departure from U.S. foreign policy that has been our bedrock since the end of  WWII.

America World PeaceKeeper

Victorious after WWII, America saw itself as the model for the world and American Dreams were to become global ones. They said it couldn’t be done yet we had just been victorious on opposite ends of the globe.

America had come out of the war as the only major industrial power not severely damaged, the richest country on earth.

After the war much of the world was economically shattered, returning home to cities that were often just rubble of broken bricks and smoldering wood, the desolate shell of a former city not yet done burning.

In our country, our economy was booming and there wasn’t a single building demolished by bombs, a brick displaced, or window broken and the only geographical scar was the one we ourselves had made on the empty deserts of New Mexico.

Uncle Sam became a hands-on uncle globetrotting around the post war world with assurance as we assumed our rightful place as peacekeeper and policeman to the world.

If the world was broken we could fix it and like Humpty Dumpty put it back together again.

Peace is Americas Most Important Business

(L) Detail of Collage by Sally Edelstein (R) Vintage Ad Republic Steel 1951

With our sparkling Pepsodent smiles Americans would meet our obligations to the free world – spreading democracy and offering a helping hand to people all around the globe – a Coke in every refrigerator and a Chevy in every garage.

As the world’s policeman we would protect the underdog from the big bullies and keep them safe. Yes sir, when there is a wrong to right, like Mighty Mouse, Uncle Sam will join the fight!

We Like Ike

Vintage Post War Recruiting Posters Us Army
(L) 1946 Ad with General Eisenhower for the US Army “Guardian of Victory” (R) 1951 Vintage Ad Us Army and US air Force Recruiting Station “Wear the uniform known around the world as the mark of a Man”

But it was important to safeguard the hard-won victory of the war and that meant building up our peace keeping force of soldiers. A massive campaign was launched to recruit  men to join the new army and U.S. Air Force whose motto was “peace is Americas most important business!”

By our victory, we have won the respect of the world,” wrote General Dwight Eisenhower former Supreme Commander of the Army and hero of WWII in one recruiting ad. “We can lose that respect and with it our influence toward a just and peaceful world order, if we reduce our military forces  to the point where they become week or ineffective.

Ambassador of Peace

“Your Army and Your Air Force Serve the Nation and Mankind in War and Peace

A popular ad that ran in 1948 appointed the American soldier as Ambassador of Peace, whose task simply put was to help the nations of the world in their efforts to balance the peace of the world at a time when too many people have despaired of peace. inviting the reader to be his companion in arms.

 On his broad young shoulders rests a burden that few Americans in history have been called upon to bear.” the ad begins. “His task is to help the nations in their efforts to balance the peace of the world at a time when too many people have despaired of peace.

He accepts his mission soberly but with pride. To him, as to every young man who has courage love of country and a belief in Democratic ideals the present world situation is a challenge. And he has met it squarely by putting on a uniform.

American soldiers don’t have to swagger to command respect. Though their numbers may be few their friendly presence in key spots around the globe inspire confidence in millions of people who are troubled and uncertain.

Soldier or Airman he is a true Ambassador of Peace.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Past Perfect- New Years Predictions

The New Year has always been the traditional time for crystal ball gazing offering tantalizing predictions for our imagined future.

For forward thinking post war Americans, peering into the future was a favorite pastime. So it was with great interest that on my very first New Years day 1956 my mid-century mom gazed ahead 20 years for a glimpse of life in 1975.

Despite the cold weather and the cold war, everyone was filled with high hopes not only for the new year, but for the future. Never before had a country so heralded the future, never before had a country so surpassed one’s highest hopes.

New Years Day 1956

On the first day of January in 1956  New Yorker’s were hit with an icy, blustery snowstorm and it showed no signs of stopping.  Cars were at a standstill as Ford Fairlaines were replaced by flexible flyers. The eerie suburban silence was broken only by the occasional sound of kids building forts in the snow drifts.

As the snow continued to fall silently, the weathermen advised everyone “to stay put in their igloos.” Fortunately for us, we were as well stocked with frozen food as any Eskimo.

Snowbound in our suburban ranch house, Dad raised the temperature on the thermostat to a balmy 80 degrees and why not; oil was still the biggest bargain in the American budget.

By late afternoon, with the dishes washed, laundry folded, and my baby bottles sterilizing in the electric sterilizer patiently awaiting refill of baby formula, Mom could take  a rare moment off for herself.

My 3-year-old brother was busily engaged with the TV. Displaying  the skill of a safe cracker,  he delicately adjusted the large knobs on the mammoth mahogany encased set- one for the snowy picture, another for the sound.

Mom could sit back, relax and give me my afternoon feeding while flipping through the latest issue of Everywomans Magazine.

 All The News Thats Fit to Print

As usual my father had his nose buried in the Sunday New York Times.

It was a slow news day. A new book released that day by the young Senator from Massacheusets, John Kennedy, garned some press.   Other than the story of Sudan declaring its independence from Egypt and the UK, and Egypt’s Nasser declaring his new year’s resolution  “to conquer Palestine,” the paper was filled with the usual new year’s predictions.

Dad read one optimistic article aloud:

Man is being thrust into the future even as he lives in the present,” the article buoyantly noted.

Mankind has already had a mouth-watering taste of the meal that technology is cooking up. Such modern wizardry’s as plastics, miracle yarns, TV, air conditioning and frozen foods, once the dream children of imaginative inventors has become commonplace…

Back to the Future 

As Mom read through the woman’s magazine, she skimmed over the feature  story on family weight planning  chock full of helpful hints on “how to slim husbands painlessly” and “add pounds to thin kiddies.”

Suddenly one article caught Moms eye.

Entitled “Predictions of Family Life Twenty Years From Now,” the colorful  feature promised to transport the reader two decades  ahead with a preview picture of life in America in 1975. Envisioning future technology, it ventured a guess at what we might find in a 1975 home.

In 1956 it was hard to imagine life getting any better.

 Tomorrows Living Today

Westinghouse Ad 1945 Post War Promises

 In 1956, Mom felt we were already living tomorrow’s life today.

Only 10 years earlier many of the post-war dreams envisioned by manufacturers busy with war production , had come true.

One end of the year ad in 1945 from Westinghouse offered a glimpse into that promised post-war world “Madam lets look to your future,” announced the headline.

What will it be like-your bright new world of tomorrow? New styles…new comforts new conveniences…new joy of living. All kinds of marvelous things to brighten your days to lighten your burdens to make life more enjoyable than ever before.

Now, it was a world of no waiting- no wondering- no defrosting- no fuss- no muss. Everything was long wearing, fast drying, king sized, the last word, the most convenient, working twice as fast.

From morning to night the colors of the rainbow were all around me thanks to all the gay and festive plastic toys and household items that surrounded me. From my pink polyethylene teething ring and vinylite pacifier right down to my cheerful Playtex waterproof Happy Baby pants in five happy lollipop colors, these laboratory-born wonder materials would make life easier and more convenient.

Yes, mine would be a sugar-frosted world of colorfast, frost-free fun.

Predictions of Family Life 20 years from Now

Intrigued by what the crystal ball-gazers would foresee for 1975, Mom read the lavishly illustrated, futuristic article aloud to me in the hopes of offering a guided tour of what we might find 20 years from now  – my own world of tomorrow.

With a dramatic flourish they announced spectacular changes for the American family. “Homes, food shopping, and transportation of all kinds will undergo tremendous transformations. Some of the great advances to be expected in the realm of family life by 1975.”

Predictions of Family Life 20 Years From Now. Vintage illustration from article “Everywoman’s Magazine” Jan. 1956 illustration by H.B.Vestal

“Tomorrow’s kitchen will be a triumph of controlled gadgetry,” Mom read with wonder and amazement, and  the same enthusiasm used for reading me a fairy tale.

The article explained:

You’ll probably have a dishwasher and clothes washer in which ultra sonic rays do the cleaning without mechanical agitation.

Mom gushed with obvious delight, visualizing her future homemaker daughter in this most modern of homes.

When you telephone,  your image will be flashed on a screen for the party at the other end, and vice  versa. TV sets will be wafer thin and hung like pictures. You’ll wear a two-way wrist radio. And your electronically guided automobile will have an  automatic parking brain.

Some of the great advances to be expected in the realm of family life by 1975 are shown in the pictures.

Predictions of Family Life 20 Years From Now. Vintage illustration from article “Everywoman’s Magazine” Jan. 1956 illustration by H.B.Vestal

Profit with Progress

The upbeat article was based on a 28-minute film that was put out in 1955 entitled  “People, Products, and Progress-1975” produced by the Chamber of Congress of the United States with the cooperation of industries and trade associations.

Interested readers were advised they could get a more detailed insight into life in 1975 from the film that was made  available for showing at local PTA meetings, Rotary and other civic clubs, and church groups.

“Does tomorrow’s world intrigue you?” the article asked the reader at the end.

“All these wonderful things will be possible,” they assured us, “so long as we maintain our free market economy, our American Way of life.”

Of course by 1975  the future had turned from promise to pessimism.

A post Watergate America saddled by an oil embargo, inflation, recession and dangerous pollution, had seen the future and nothing had turned out as advertised.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Once upon a time real national emergencies  were shared with us by our President  in the oval office.

Seated behind the ornately carved  Resolute desk, it signaled that these were somber, sobering talks.  Ronald Reagan spoke to us after the tragic Challenger disaster seated at that historical  desk and it was where George W. Bush addressed a frightened nation in the wake of 9/11.

This 19th century partners desk a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford Hays has been the backdrop to many real American crises. And now sadly some that are totally fabricated.

But it was  the 1962 televised address from the oval office by President Kennedy to the nation informing us of a missile crisis in Cuba that still remains so vivid to me.

A crises that was all too real.

The Longest Day

My Mother  had already had her longest day dealing with the measles crisis when the Cuban Missile Crisis was announced. (R) Headline of NY Daily News announcing the Cuban blockade

Monday Madness

Monday, October 22, 1962  was a day of superb weather with a burnish of autumn on the trees. Things had never looked lovelier or more peaceful.

But I was stuck at  home with a bad case of the German measles.These itchy red spots were spreading from my face to my body as quickly as the Red Communists aggression was visualized on maps and film strips at school

October 22 was also my parent’s 12th wedding anniversary.

They had planned on going to the movies that evening to see “The Longest Day”, that star-studded spectacle about D Day the Normandy invasion.

But now that our normally germ-proof home had itself been invaded with a contagious disease, plans were promptly cancelled.

John Wayne would have to wait.

Besides which my parents were anxious to watch President Kennedy’s live broadcast on television that evening.

Panic Goes Viral

At noon, while Mom was preparing lunch , JFK’s press secretary Pierre Salinger had made a dramatic announcement that the president would speak that night “on a matter of the highest national urgency.”

The crisis that was brewing in Cuba that had begun a week earlier had been kept top-secret. Now with rumors circulating, there was a nearly unbearable sense of foreboding and tension.

Across the country while American’s eyes would be fixed on their TV sets gripped in the most intense moment of recent history, I was confined to my bedroom without a TV. At a loss, I trained my ears to tune in to the console playing in the living room.

We Interrupt This Program…

At 7:00, I could hear the TV announcer from the popular game show based on the game charades saying: “Stump the Stars will not be seen tonight so that we can bring you this special broadcast….”

Along with 50 million other Americans my parents listened in pin-drop silence as President Kennedy spoke about Cuba.

Sitting behind the ornate Resolute desk, a solemn President Kennedy got right to the point. This was no time to play charades.

He grimly announced to a shocked nation that Russia had sneaked missiles into Cuba just 90 miles from Florida. Along with the Offensive Missiles, Khrushchev had deployed bombs and 40,000 Soviet troops.

The alarming evidence from photographs showed that nearly every city from Lima, Peru to Hudson Bay, Canada would lie within push button range of thermonuclear bombs in Cuba.

Panic was about to go Viral

Every major US city would lie within push button range of thermonuclear bombs in Cuba.

“To halt this offensive build up,” a determined Kennedy said, “a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment to Cuba is being initiated.” The Navy’s mission was to block the flow of Russian weapons to Cuba.

Like me and my measles, the Russians would have a quarantine imposed on them but Dad wasn’t convinced this was the best tactic. It might work for preventing the spread of the measles but not for the missiles. If Russians didn’t withdraw the missiles as demanded, a U.S. pre-emptive strike against the launch site was inevitable.

The United States would not shrink from the threat of nuclear war to preserve the peace and freedom of Western Hemisphere, Kennedy said firmly.

The President’s voice faded away as my parents grimly turned to another channel to watch “I’ve got a Secret.”

Struggling with the ramifications of what they just heard, the longest day was about to get a lot longer.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Color history whitewashed.

The revisionist history of the Civil War continues today as Trump tries to defend his vile Charlottesville remark by praising Robert E Lee, a slave owner who led the fight against his own country to preserve slavery. Trump claims the “very fine people” remark was about the people who felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E Lee. A great general whether you like it or not.”

Like the South’s “The Lost Cause,” Robert E. Lee was the whitewashed version of history I learned over 50 years ago when the Civil War had been successfully  rebranded as “brave brothers” having a quarrel.

Gettysburg

You don’t have to tour a battlefield to understand the Civil War. Look at today’s headlines. We’re still fighting the same issues that fueled the Civil War. The author and her brother at Gettysburg during the Centennial 1963

No place had a more romanticized cast swept over it than Gettysburg did during the Centennial Civil war celebration in 1963  and naturally my family would find itself right there. .

You don’t have to tour a battlefield to understand the Civil War. Look at today’s headlines. We’re still fighting the same issues that fueled the Civil War. The author and her brother at Gettysburg during the Centennial 1963

My Mad Men era childhood vacations were often spent visiting the past.

Through the years I saw more than my share of the thousands of granite, bronze and marble monuments and statues that dotted the American landscape that helped shape popular perspectives of the past.

Loaded with assumptions and silences, the often sanitized, selective, historical narrative presented at all these places permeated the country, the classroom, and historic sites during mid-century America.

When it came to American history no place was loaded with more excitement or education than my visits to Gettysburg Pennsylvania. Certainly no National Park offered more bang for your buck per square foot when it came to monuments and statues  honoring our soldiers and generals.

Centennial Fever

Civil War Centennial postcard, top and Civil War Trading Card

In 1961 Americans caught Centennial fever and so did my family. Even as Americans raced forward into the New Frontier, we took time out to travel back and celebrate our past.

I Wish I Were In Dixie

States rights had a very special meaning in 1863 and 1963. Celebrating the historic moment when the southern states seceded from the Union dove tailed nicely for segregationists. What better way to encourage  opposition to court ordered public schools desegregation and black civil rights activism than to remind southerners of their ancestor’s uncompromising resistance to federal tyranny and unlawful assaults on southern institutions. Top illustration from vintage School Book “This is America’s Story” 1963. Governor George Wallace blocking the entrance of black students to University of Alabama 1963

For southerners, the 100th anniversary of the Civil War was a chance to unfurl the Confederate battle flags, wax poetically over the heroism of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and romanticize the resistance to Federal power.

Southern Hospitality. Part of the Southern myth making was the notion that many black slaves had been loyal to the pro slavery Confederacy, therefore happily accepted Jim Crow laws.

The “Lost Cause” was still the dominant story, and in this Gone with the Wind version, the southern gentlemen fought valiantly against a stronger (and less scrupulous) northern army and their noble aim was to protect states’ rights and a gracious way of life. Slaves were portrayed as contented and loyal, if discussed at all.

That peculiar institution had seamlessly been replaced by Jim Crow.

Reunited and It Feels So Good

1913 Sheet Music emphasized the attempts at National reconciliation between the North and South.

The War that had once been bitterly referred to as “The War of Rebellion” or the “War of Yankee Aggression” had for several generations now been firmly re-branded as the more friendly sounding “War Between Brothers.”

In this more sentimental reconciliatory light of Brother Against Brother, important lessons could be taught about the common bonds of bravery and patriotism on both sides. Treason was barely uttered.  Schoolbooks taught us that the War Between the State’s struggle had allowed the nation to emerge into “the bright sunshine of freedom.”

Of course that sunshine still did not shine for all.

Gettysburg

Tourism to visit Civil War landmarks was booming, really heating up in the summer. Battlefields replaced beaches as part of easy breezy summer living. No mid-century vacation was complete without a visit to a Civil War battlefield.

Since Gettysburg was ground zero for Civil War Centennial remembrance, early on Monday July 1, my family loaded up our Plymouth and headed down to Gettysburg that summer of 1963 in time for the 100th anniversary of that conflicts  most celebrated and bloodiest battle.

Arriving in Gettysburg on the very day the two armies met and the great battle began, the town was exploding with tourists.

Official Silver Medal Gettysburg Centennial 1963 (L) Souvenir Civil War cup(R)

The Civil War was packaged in easy to understand stories and fun activities.

Pageants, re-enactments and parades filled the week. Souvenirs abounded. I could buy “real” civil war bullets for 30 cents,  stock up on Confederate money which to my disappointment would do me no good on purchasing all  these goodies, all while snacking greedily on pecans purchased at a Stuckeys built on the battlefield where the second day of fighting raged at Peach Orchard, site of a famous civil war battle.

I’m Just Saying

Vintage Brochure to visit Gettysburg

The local shops displayed banners paying tribute to the Blue and Grey Americans “all who were fighting for a just cause they believed in.”

Odes to the “Brothers War” was everywhere to be seen.

Every restaurant place mat had a civil war theme and every packet of Dixie Crystal sugar on the table told a Civil War story on the back. In a nod to Dixie, hominy grits migrated above the Mason Dixon lines and were served at every breakfast, “to make our Dixiecrats feel at home since they didn’t receive such a warm welcome last time.”

Robert E. Lee Trading Card. A series of trading cards produced during the Civil war Centennial could be purchased at your local candy store. Along with your bubble gum you could chew over the romanticized version of the Civil War. General Robert E. Lee, was now recast an honorable man who chose loyalty to VA over command of the Union Army. That he fought bravely to protect the Confederate constitution that enshrined the institution of Negro slavery went unsaid.

Even the local bank commissioned a majestic painting of Generals Meade and Lee standing together united, by conviction. They handed out keepsake postcards of the painting and I eagerly grabbed a few.

“General Lee,” the postcards said was not only “universally revered by friend and foe alike” but “also “a symbol of the true spirit of America. Talented, generous devoted to duty…he belongs to all of us.”

Dad who had spent 6 years at school in Charlottesville, VA couldn’t agree more. Lee was a bone fide American hero.

Make Believe

Pickett’s Charge- Painting from Gettysburg Museum of History

Souvenirs notwithstanding, the climax of the three-day battle Centennial celebration was on that Wednesday. On July 3 the 100th anniversary of Pickett’s Charge, that bold attack against the Union Army that was a turning point for the war, was dramatically re-created.

At precisely high noon, the silence of the field of grass and gray boulders was filled with shrieks and smoke as 15,000 uniformed Johnny Rebs charged across the field against the Union forces on Cemetery Ridge. A sound system produced cannon and musket fire and a smoke screen produced smoke. With eyes stinging you felt like you were in the heat of battle.

Civil War re-enactors at the Gettysburg Centennial Celebration. Photo courtesy Gettysburg Museum

Unlike in  1863 when the brave charge failed,  with ¾ of the attackers killed or wounded, in 1963 the event concluded with Union soldiers greeting Confederates with firm and friendly handshakes. Finally those in gray and those in blue grasped hands, and all boisterously sang The Star Spangled Banner and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Smoke aside, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

It was the perfect ending to an American story.

Just as many southern survivors of the war and their descendants worked hard to make Black Americans and their story disappear, the state monuments they erected continued their work, glorifying the Southern Cause. When folks expressed concern about the possible upset at the Centennial by African-Americans protesting segregation, Karl Betts, a member of the Centennial commission reassured folks.  “A lot of fine Negro people, he told a journalist from the Nation, “loved life as it was in the Old South.” (L) Mississippi Monument at Gettysburg. (R) The savages of slavery

Noticeably absent in that very white field of grey and blue was the color Black.

The Centennial was pretty much an all-white affair. African-Americans avoided the battlefield uninterested in monuments celebrating white supremacy and the Confederacy cause, or in mingling with pasty-faced tourists with their Brownie Hawkeyes, waving souvenir Confederate flags.

If the goal of the Centennial was “keeping peace through understanding” some things were clearly misunderstood.

 American United

Vintage Textbook Illustration “This is America’s Story” 1963.

The Centennial had been planned in the cold war climate of the late 1950’s and the Civil War would be hi-jacked for the current  war between democracy and Communism, painting American democracy in the best light.   The Commission determined that the Civil War Centennial would be a great opportunity for Americans to “highlight our commitment to freedom and liberty.”

Family Feud

1913 Great Reunion at the Gettysburg Jubilee celebration . Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Fifty years earlier at the Jubilee celebration in 1913, the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg was a neatly packaged festival of North South reconciliation that had begun in the late 19th century. The celebration was also a segregated affair in which the only role for African-Americans was distributing blankets to the white veterans of what President Wilson a segregationist called “a quarrel forgotten.”

Now this “Quarrel” would be remembered as simply a family feud, brother against brother, the horrors of slavery long forgotten.

One Nation Under God

For school children the Centennial was to be an important history lesson in democracy. “Children will will gain a new conception of the meaning of their priceless heritage of human citizenship.”

In 1960, a year before the centennial, President Eisenhower remarked at the death of the last Civil War soldier: “…the wounds of the deep and bitter dispute which once divided our nation have long since healed and a united America in a divided world now holds up on a larger canvas the cherished traditions of liberty and justice for all.”

The war had been permanently rebranded in national memory as the moment when the US had been reunited and the moral leader of the Free World had been born. The Civil War was one part of American Exceptionalism.

Liberty and Justice For All

Vintage ad Sinclair Oil 1963 included a statement from Civil War historian Bruce Catton

Typical of Centennial  ads at the time that extolled patriotism, Gettysburg, and the American Way (with a touch o’ tourism thrown in) was this ad from Sinclair Oil in honor of the Gettysburg Centennial:

You can stand and sight along the barrels of 233 Union Guns or 182 Confederate cannons, standing just as they stood on those fateful July days in ’63.

More importantly, you will stand in Gettysburg with eyes closed, and you’re your mind will be touched by the hand of history and your spirit will feel the inspiration that gave Lincoln his finest speech. All Americans North and South can take pride in Gettysburg.

Millions of us have forebears who fought on one side or the other, hotly defending their own idea of liberty. This great battlefield so beautifully preserved by our national Park service is a tribute to the men who fought here.

But America, today united from sea to sea, is their monument.

But the reality was we weren’t all so united.

At all.

The Freedom Riders, the sit ins, marches and boycotts told a different story about “defending their own idea of liberty.”

The South Carolina Monument drew on Civil War past to make a statement about the present, Dedicated on July 2, 1963 to the tune of Dixie and Confederate flag flying it was filled by defiant speeches about States rights and the “tyranny of Washington.” The heritage of honor also meant denying Blacks basic civil rights. (Top) South Carolina memorial 1963 (Bottom) Civil Rights sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina. Four college students sit in a “whites only” lunch counter at Woolworths in defiance of segregation Feb. 1960

As Americans prepared to celebrate the Civil War, the inconvenient truth was that many of the same passions that divided the nation 100 years earlier divided it still. And still does today. The freedom and equality consecrated by the Civil War still remained elusive.

Even as the civil rights activists in Birmingham made clear that the civil war’s unfinished business was very much in the present, Uncle Sam and planners of the Centennial didn’t want to bring up that pesky problem of slavery into the celebration of the Centennial. How much nicer to embrace the enduring romance, the warm and fuzzy history of a national redemption, brother against brothers war.

It was a good story of democracy in action, important in our anti-communist crusade. The moral of the Civil War story was that only democratic change made social justice possible no matter how gradual.

Freedom Riders. (L) General Longstreet fighting for the “just” Confederate cause (R) Civil Rights Freedom Riders Bus burned near Anniston, Alabama 1961

That pesky problem was a black eye for Uncle Sam as leader of the Free World.  The lynchings, violence and racial segregation marred the image of the U.S. and tarnished our moral superiority.

And that pesky problem couldn’t be whitewashed away.

Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Alabama. Confederate monuments were built to maintain white supremacy and offer an idealized narrative of the Civil War. Monuments all read that Confederate States were fighting for “a righteous cause and the sacred heritage of honor.”  The Alabama State Monument dedicated in 1933 by the  United Daughters of the Confederacy an organization dedicated to glorifying the “Southern Cause.” The monument features a beautiful Romanesque female, the female personification of the “Spirit of Confederacy” flanked by 2 soldiers. Portraying the spirit of the Confederate cause as a beautiful woman distorts a much more sinister historical truth. They fought bravely to protect the Confederate constitution that enshrined the institution of Negro Slavery(R) Birmingham Alabama 1963

The centennial anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg took place in the midst of the tumultuous summer of 1963.

That May, people across the world had been stunned by the images coming out of Birmingham, Alabama: police officers turning high-pressure fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators and ordering dogs to attack children. In June, Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own driveway. That very same month Alabama Governor George “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” Wallace stood defiantly on the steps of the University of Alabama and denied entry to black students seeking an education.

A century after the battle, the issue of racial inequality remained in the foreground and background.

Fighting For a Noble Cause 1863 and 1963. (L) General Robert E Lee Virginia State Monument and (R) Civil Rights March on Washington. One month after the Centennial in August 1963 Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have A Dream Speech” as African Americans marched from Washington Monument to Lincoln Memorial. Photo by Rowland Scherman for USIA

In the shadow of the Civil Rights movement, the idea of  commemorating a war that ended slavery being reduced to pageantry and not an occasion to reflect on bigger issues of what was won or lost, was a lost opportunity

The unfinished business of the past that was very much in the present. Ours too.

 Copyright (©) 2017 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

MAD Magazine’s sensibility shaped our current culture of cynicism, credited with spawning today’s “Snark Generation.” This April 1974 issue of MAD was the most controversial cover. Many newsstands and candy stores refused to sell it

What Me Worry?

I am MAD.

After 67 years MAD Magazine will cease publishing this fall. It will no longer be found on newsstands but sold via subscription. There will be no new material, just “best of content” and end of year specials. It’s all but dead for most of us, certainly not the vital life force it once was. Though technically on life support, it feels more like hospice, just biding its time for its eventual demise.

In a world gone mad, we need MAD Magazine more than ever.

In these times more perhaps than ever we need satire.

The satirists job is to push boundaries, expose our weakness and point out the social fiction we tell ourselves.

Simply put, a satirist is necessary for the health of a society.

The satirist’s job is to push boundaries, expose our weakness and point out the social fiction we tell ourselves.

Simply put, a satirist is necessary for the health of a society.

A Culture Challenged

Mad Magazine April 1971 William M Gaines publisher, Al Feldstein editor, contributing artists and writers The Usual Gang of Idiots

If a satirists noble calling is to challenge the culture at large no one did it better than MAD Magazine, especially in its mid-century heyday when it provoked a generation of baby boomers to think critically.

Including me.

With the same tenacity as the terrier in the Wizard of Oz, those “usual gang of idiots”- the creative group of writers and illustrators who changed the landscape of humor – pulled back the curtain on society revealing it to be less than perfect.

MAD’s presence was prescient.

Post war America was churning out myths as fast as they did Chevrolets, and MAD just as rapidly skewered them.

On the Attack

MAD’s satiric net was cast wide parodying the ongoing American culture. By the late 1960s it satirized sexual revolution, hippies, the generation gap, and Vietnam. Portraits of Alfred E. Neuman were painted by Norman Mingo, Frank Kelly Freas and Richard Williams

Not only did the satirical monthly attack the huskerism of Madison Avenue, the chicanery of politicians, the pretensions of those in authority and the duplicity of everyday life, it was a fun-house mirror reflection of what was culturally popular … all in a 48 page, densely illustrated magazine – all for a measly quarter. ( Of course there  was a lot  of grumbling when those “ganefs” at MAD raised the price from 25 cents -cheap, to 35 cents-highway robbery ).

Because of MAD I would be inoculated with a heavy dose of skepticism offering a lifetime of immunity from accepting institutional hypocrisy and dishonesty.

A MAD Journey

Published during the deep freeze of the cold war, these parodies helped take a bit of the chill out of the air.  Vintage illustration MAD Magazine

In a mid-century culture of mutually assured consumption and mutually assured destruction, it’s not surprising my own creative journey began with MAD.

Growing up in the atomic age of nuclear families and nuclear jitters, cold warriors and hot wars, mad men and happy housewives, MAD’s cynical eye offered a road map to navigate this rapidly changing world.

Just as a decade later I would wait with anticipation for the next SNL episode to air  to see who or what would be lampooned, so I would count the days until the latest issue of MAD appeared to see who would come under their knife.

Candy Store Capers

Mad Follies 1963 with content from 1957-1963

Every month, a quarter clutched tightly in my hand, I would head down to the neighborhood candy store to buy the latest issue of MAD Magazine.

Dog-eared, older issues of the magazine, hand-me-downs from my brother were treasured, but buying my very own copy felt like a rite of passage.

Our neighborhood candy store Katz’s with its overhead tin sign from Bryer’s ice cream and creaking wooden telephone booths in the back of the store,  was the type of establishment once found in every neighborhood in Brooklyn and Queens. A throwback to a previous era it  now seemed woefully out-of-place amongst the new developments of split level and ranch homes of my Long Island suburban neighborhood.

All the News Unfit to Print

Mad’s back covers didn’t take a back seat to the front ones. (L) The back cover of the Watergate era April 1974 Mad features President Richard Nixon as George Washington professing not to have told a lie: “I cannot tell a lie. I didn’t do it.” (R) A powerfully different view of returning soldiers from Vietnam

Walking into the store,  I would give a quick glance at the newsstand outside that displayed an assortment of newspapers secured under heavy sash weights. Bold black headlines shrieked with news of Vietnam, Race Riots and Watergate but I preferred my news straight from Alfred E. Neuman.

Once inside, as your eyes adjusted to the dim light, an unforgettable aroma enveloped you- a mixture of candy, cigarettes, cedar wood cigar boxes and their contents, paper goods, and printing ink not yet dry from the daily’s,weeklies and monthlies constantly turning over in the rhythm of business.

Since the mainstay of the candy store was of course candy I would immediately purchase pink Bazooka bubble gum to chew while I perused the merchandise. The tiny wax paper color comics that came with the gum were quickly crumbled into a pocket.

Bazooka Joe and his black eye-patch were no match for what lay ahead.

Comic Book Heaven

In the early 1950’s comic books were thought to corrupt children, so a Comics Book Code was put into place to save American kids from a life of juvenile delinquency. To get around the code of comics with its wholesome dictates, Mad Comics created by Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein simply converted to a magazine format to escape the censors knife.

Before me would be row after row, rack after spinning rack of brand new comic books a tempting riot of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. It was a universe of vibrating, pulsing dots, speech bubbles and plot-filled panels, a flat world magically come alive thanks to the miracle of four-color separation printing.

As much as I loved Harvey Comics with its official comic book seal of approval and its cast of doe-eyed characters like Little Dot and Little Audrey, I would gleefully bypass Richie Rich and head straight to MAD Magazine.

More than gaudy colors, it was caustic humor that caught my eye.

There nestled slyly next to Betty and Veronica perpetually duking it out for Archie’s affection would be the smirking face of Alfred E. Neuman his “what me worry” countenance beckoning me with his topical satire.

Sure I could laugh at Little Lotta and her insatiable appetite for only 12 cents but a quarter brought chuckles at a chubby Nikita Khrushchev with his equally insatiable appetite for cold war Communist bluster.

A Cast of Cold War Characters

Mad was like a course on international politics. Where else would an 8-year-old easily learn and recite the names of world leader like Castro, Nasser, Mao, Tito and Khrushchev. In “Mad Visits A White House Summit”published In June of 1963 at the height of the cold war, Mad wondered what would happen if they held a summit meeting of world leader at the White House., thinking a more congenial setting like the president’s home might offer a better solution to world peace.

Published during the deep freeze of the cold war, these parodies helped take a bit of the chill out of the air.

MAD did more than mock the adult world.

MAD was also cunningly educational. Lessons learned from my Weekly Reader often eluded me; tutored by the skilled pens of Mort Drucker, Wally Wood and Frank Jacobs, lessons about politics and current events were indelibly etched in my mind.

More importantly MAD taught us to read between the lines.

Consuming Passions

Seductively displayed next to the comic books were the plethora of oversize mass market magazines, swollen with consumer ads.

These popular publications whose demise was decades away , bulged with glowing color drenched ads, its lavish high gloss pages filled with an idealized mid-century America enjoying their post-war promises of prosperity and the cornucopia of consumer goods that were coursing through the culture.

It was pure catnip to MAD.

Does Mad or… Doesn’t Mad

One of the classic spoofs by Mad mocking Shirley Polykoffs suggestive Clairol catch phrase of the 1950’s and early 60’s “Does She or Doesn’t She?” (L) The addition of a boy into this well-known series made the suggestive caption more clear especially as the boy appeared older in each ad, until it was finally refused by Life Magazine. Natural Mad’s (R) parody of the Clairol ad asked “Does she or doesn’t she …ever go out with fellows her own age?” calling for a “Miss Clairol Date Ager Kit” for the boy.

Because there was no advertising in their magazine MAD could satirize materialistic culture without fear of reprisal.

So with a gleaming Pepsodent smile, MAD Magazine mercilessly skewered the American consumer culture including its cultural heroes the real Mad Men of Madison Avenue who helped define the post war American suburban dream.

Have a Coke and a Smile

The 12th Annual Edition of The Worst From Mad “A collection of humor satire and garbage from past issues 1966, 1967 and 1969

Sometimes if I was especially flush with allowance I would sit at the soda fountain at the candy store and have a milkshake or a cherry coke , while I flipped through my newly acquired MAD , unable to wait till I got home to read it cover to fold-out cover.

Sitting at the dark walnut stained wooden counter, spinning on the vinyl stools I would look at my reflection on the sliding glass doors that stood behind it. The closed glass cabinet which held school supplies and stationary was curiously out of reach for the customer, who I am sure would rather steal a racy magazine than a marbled covered notebook.

Fascinated as much by the whirling, vibrating sound of the sea-foam green Hamilton Beach malted machine as the uncontrollable trembling of poor, Parkinson’s afflicted Mr. Katz as he prepared the malted milkshakes, I couldn’t tell who shook more.

Meanwhile I watched as his elderly wife Mrs. Katz with her gnarled arthritic hands struggled to scoop the frozen Bryers strawberry ice cream from the big multi-gallon tub into a small white cardboard container for another customer to bring home as a treat for the kiddies, more accustomed to getting their frozen treats from the Good Humor man.

The Mad Suburban Primer

The candy store with its egg creams, halavah and long salted pretzels was a temporary respite, a world away from the new and improved suburban world in which it resided, more at home in Flatbush than in Franklin Square. The  Brooklyn born meshuggeneh’s from MAD would feel right at home.

Armed with my freshly minted MAD in hand I would hurry back home, squinting as my eyes adjusted once again to the garish sunlight of suburbia.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

As the Supreme Court convenes to decide whether employers can legally fire workers because they are LGBTQ, it’s worth taking a look back at the U.S. government’s own shameful history, when not that long ago, thousands of hard-working, qualified Americans were summarily fired from their jobs just for their sexual orientation.

Once upon a time our government actively sought out Gays and Lesbians for termination considering them unfit for employment. Condemmed as perverts, the Lavender Scare was a witch hunt resulting in mass firings of gays from governemt jobs

The story is worth remembering.

America The Right to Choose

(L) Illustration from Vintage Boy Scout Handbook- A Handbook of Training For Citizenship Through Scouting (R) Free to Choose article from vintage Boys Life Magazine

Like most mid-century Americans, Virgil Adams believed hard work paid off. Like truth and justice, it was the American way.

So in 1950 when an article  appeared in Virgil’s Boys Life Magazine outlying the promise of the American Dream stating: “the right to choose any career a fellow felt qualified to follow,” it merely confirmed what the earnest 16-year-old Eagle Scout already knew.. “Americans Are Free To Choose the Kinds of Work they Want to Do.”

With a good job, he would achieve the American Dream.

Land of Opportunity

“In the US all the people have the right to choose in nearly everything that concerns them…that’s what it meant to be an American.” the impressionable honors student proudly read.  “Only under the great American system of free enterprise that not only challenges individual initiative but provides opportunity, could this be achieved!”

All across America post war prosperity was booming. Opportunity, Virgil was certain, would come a knocking.

In Springfield, the Adams family had a long history of civil service. Like his father and grandfather, he would choose to work in government, eager for a chance to serve Uncle Sam.

Whose Choice?

Vintage Illustration from “Boys Life Magazine” – The Right to Choose

While our optimistic young eagle scout was reading the “Boys Life” article extolling our great American system of free choice, Republican senators were setting in motion actions that would severely limit the ability to choose.

Lavender Scare

With Senator Joseph McCarthy creating a culture of fear and paranoia with his communist witch hunt, he fanned the flame by claiming that a “homosexual underground” was aiding the “communist conspiracy.”

America was being infiltrated not only by a red menace but a lavender menace as well

Post war paranoids weren’t just looking under their beds for communists; they were also checking their closets (and their neighbors) for homosexuals

With religious fervor, government alarmists cried: “As dangerous as the actual communists, are the ‘sexual perverts’ who have infiltrated our government in recent years!”

Where is My Roy Cohen?

McCarthy hired Roy Cohen, himself a closeted homosexual, as chief counsel for his Congressional subcommittee. Together these 2 men were responsible for the firing of scores of gay men and women from working in the government.

Americans may have preferred being “dead than red,” but in that mid-century hot-house of homophobia nobody wanted to be considered “queer.”

Government By The People For The People

“An American has the right to choose any career he feels qualified to follow, education and training are available to him in practically any type of work he chooses to do!” from The Right to Choose “Boys Life Magazine”
(L) Vintage Ad for Government Jobs (R) 1950 NY Times Article “Sexual perverts have infiltrated our government as dangerous as Communists”

Republicans formed a subcommittee to study the Truman’s administration employment policy concerning homosexuals.

The 1950 Senate report entitled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” led to the systematic purging of gay and lesbians from the government.

Experts argued that “moral perverts” were bad national security risks because of their susceptibility to blackmail and threat of exposure, recommending that homosexuals be dismissed from government jobs.

Adding insult to injury, gays were unsuitable for government jobs because of the “lack of emotional stability which is found in most sex perverts and the weakness of their moral fiber.”

Morally Straight

Vintage Illustrations From Boy Scout Handbook- Scout Oath

When it came to moral fiber, no one could beat a Boy Scout. Virgil lived by the Boy Scout oath: “On my honor to do my duty to God and my country.”

Virgil Adams was proud to be a Scout and proud to be an American.

“You owe it to your country to become a good citizen to do your best,” his scout leader would tell his troop. “It is important to America and to yourself that you become a citizen of fine character, physically strong mentally awake and morally straight.”

As a good scout Virgil was indeed morally straight…but privately he was gay.

One thing that wasn’t a choice was his homosexuality.

Most folks in Springfield preferred to think that there were no homosexuals in their own town. Maybe a handful in Chicago. Definitely some in NYC. But certainly not Springfield.

Grappling with his feelings, Virgil would adhere to the Boy Scout credo of “Being Prepared”-a good scout is always in a state of readiness in mind and body to face danger.”

Virgil’s secret would be buried as deeply as the atom bomb was from our enemies.

Proud to Be an American

“ We must defend America against the enemies within our own borders-enemies who sow the seeds of distrust among our people, who try to stir up hatred who attempt to ruin others by lies and smears, who break our laws.” Boy Scout Handbook
(L) Vintage 1947 US Army Air Force Recruiting Advertisement (R) vintage illustration patriotic boy scouts. from “Boy Scout Handbook”

“Citizenship is your privilege,” the Boy Scouts had taught him. It would be his honor and privilege to do his bit for his country.

Heeding Uncle Sam’s call in 1953 he served with distinction in Korea. Now that the champion of his childhood, General Dwight Eisenhower was the new commander-in-chief, Virgil accepted his mission soberly and with pride.

I Like Ike…Ike Doesn’t Like You

While our Eagle Scout fought bravely overseas at the Battle of Pork Chop Hill, back home his hero Dwight Eisenhower launched a full-blown attack on homosexuals, signing a bill calling for the removal of homosexuals from all Federal agencies.

The homophobic hysteria was at an all-time high.

During the 1952 Presidential elections the Republicans claimed that the Truman administration was “honeycombed with homosexuals” and his policy for dismissing homosexuals was criticized as too weak.

Ike would take care of that in short order.

Law and Order

Within 3 months of being sworn in at his inauguration, in the spring of 1953 President Eisenhower issued Executive order 10450 which empowered all Federal agencies to investigate and fire workers on the grounds of “sexual perversion” effectively banning gays and lesbians from working for any agency of the federal government.

The Order mandated the investigation of homosexuality not only of persons in sensitive positions but of any government employee and of all new applicants for positions. Homosexuals were harassed in local and state government too.

An employee who felt he was dismissed unfairly would have no recourse beyond his department. He could be fired merely on the basis of an anonymous accusation.

 Outcast

Virgil’s conscious, formed by the Boy Scouts code of ethics told him to obey the laws of our country. After all, ”America’s laws,” the Scouts affirmed,” were created to benefit all our people – to keep them safe.”

Struggling with his homosexual feelings, policing his emotions, he lived so deep in the shadows he was sure to leave no trace of his secret.

Scouting For A Job

(L) Vintage Book “How to Get a Civil Service Job” by Arthur Liebers 1959 (R) vintage illustration from “Boy Scout Handbook” A Boy Scout Traits

When he returned from the service, the decorated veteran expected to have the American Dream gift wrapped and tied with a red white and blue bow.

Virgil wanted to continue serving Uncle Sam and do his part in keeping America great. Naturally he applied to the civil service, the Adam’s “family business.”

Because it was an old American tradition to give preference in government jobs to honorably discharged veterans, Virgil Adams received a position immediately.

Taking his oath of office seriously, he swore he wasn’t a communist and did not belong to any group that advanced the overthrow of the government.

We Will Work It Out

“By helping other people at all times by working with them you will come to know the kind of people that Americans are and learn to get along with all of them”
(L) Vintage illustration “Boys Life Magazine”- The Right to Choose (R) Illustration from vintage ad 1953

Virgil worked hard, stayed late and boosted the morale of the office.

He knew that if he was good at his work and was ambitious he was certain to advance to higher paid levels. He remembered the words from Boys Life that he had read years ago:  “In America employers are always anxious to reward workers whose industry and ability qualify them for advancement and increased wages.”

It was the American way.

Be Prepared

“A good scout he learns to respect others rights, treat them justly give the a fair chance, to become a true American boy who will grow into a true, upright American man.”
(L) Boy Scouts American’s Creed from “The Boy Scout Handbook” (R) 1950 NY Times Article “Sexual perverts have infiltrated our government as dangerous as Communists”

Virgil had learned early a good scout is always prepared.

The scout’s motto meant that you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty and to face danger.

But nothing prepared Virgil for what was to come.

You’re Out

One day he was brought into an office and told he must resign.

The Civil Service Commission put him through 4 days of interrogation. For the first 3 days he was confronted with evidence of his communist leanings such as having danced with a female USSR liaison officer in Korea when he served there.

On the fourth day he was asked directly “Are you a homosexual?” After his adamant denial he was informed that the government had unearthed evidence. He was seen in the company of a known “pervert.”

With no better proof against him, he was banned from federal government employment “for security reasons on the grounds of moral turpitude.”

Immoral lawbreakers were unfit to serve in government.

Humiliated and with no choice, he was forced out of his job

Broken Promises

Vintage illustration from ” Boys Life Magazine” The Right to Choose- Americans Are Free to Choose The the Kind of Work They want to Do

“The American is Free to pursue happiness in his work as well as in his leisure “he recalled with some bitterness. “An American has the right to choose any career he feels qualified to follow.”

Some Americans it seems were not free to choose the kind of work they want to do.

No Choice

The lavender scare lasted far longer than the red scare and during the Eisenhower administration the purge of gays from the government reached its peak. For the next 3 decades FBI and other federal agents hunted down thousands of LGBT workers who were fired from their jobs. Careers were ruined lives destroyed.

If most Americans seemed blithely unaware of all the discrimination, it was only because they never chose to really look.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

You Might Also Enjoy

Boy Scouts Morally Straight…and Gay

The Right is Wrong

Locked in the American Dream

The iconic George Lois Esquire Magazine Cover from May 1967. Lois was to comment that the cover represented “the moment when all American kids started to grow up with live violence in his carpeted den complete with an all American Hamburger and Coke.”

History was compressed into a single weekend that November of 1963.

It was the weekend that never seemed to end, that began with a TV bulletin and ended with a burning flame flickering on TV screens across the nation.

Like a relentless Greek tragedy, the Kennedy assassination was a trauma played out over 75 straight hours on French Provincial wood consoles and sleek portable TV sets from coast to coast; its indelible impressions burned into our collective consciousness for half a century.

Vintage Advertisement Motorola TV 1950s

TV, that post war miracle that promised to bring the family closer,  made good on its promise that weekend.

There was no time that weekend to reflect, no time to collect oneself, no time for anything but to sit transfixed before the set and try to bring into reality this unthinkable thing.

The Wonderful World of Color Goes Black and White

The television landscape normally littered with canned laughter, persistent commercials, and goofy game shows had suddenly been silenced and stilled. In their place was an endless stream of tragic images.

In the end, it would be a series of sounds and pictures emanating from our TV sets  that would always remain in the minds of those who watched: the bloodstained suit, the widow’s mourning veil, the little boy saluting the casket, the tum tum tum-a-ta-tum of the muffled drums, the band playing “Hail to the Chief” in dirge time, the hollow clip-clop of the horses hooves, the spirited riderless horse Blackjack, and a little girl’s white-gloved  hand gently touching a coffin.

Countered against all this was the jarring impact of the assassin’s own murder, so quick so nightmarish and so immediate because an already traumatized nation saw it happen on live TV.

This was the event that scholars have noted that legitimated television in the eyes of the public. In one weekend America had gone from a print and radio nation to a television nation.

It was our baptism into the TV generation

November 24, 1963-  No Ordinary Sunday

Vintage Campbell’s Soup advertisement

It was lunchtime and our Sunday routine seemed oddly ordinary.

As usual, Mom was at the stove preparing a bowl of Campbell’s Tomato soup for me. The perfect meal for a cold blustery November day,  its hearty tomatoey fragrance filled the house…..mmm…mmm good.

As always, Dad was just getting around to reading the news section of Sunday’s N.Y. Times, having already devoured the sports section earlier. And as usual, my brother was grousing about something- today’s complaint was the complete upheaval of television – our Sunday favorite Let’s Have Fun was nowhere to be found on the TV.

But it was anything but an ordinary day.

A numbing sorrow gripped everyone.

The impact of grief over the death of our president was apparent. On Saturday streets were deserted, stores empty, theaters half-filled. Rain had fallen in N.Y. and the bleak November sky accentuated the deafening of emptiness and loss.

This was the mood of the country and my family.

Since Friday afternoon, networks and independent stations had completely canceled commercials and regularly scheduled programs.   Continuous news reports about the assassination and related events were supplemented by special programs.

All related to the death of our youthful, dazzling, president.

Quite out of the ordinary, my parent’s portable 17-inch television set had remained in our suburban kitchen since Friday. For 4 days its flickering presence uncharacteristically accompanied all our meals.

Watching endless TV became the weekends’ new norm.

Friday, November 22 – We Interrupt This Program

Routinely, Mom would roll the portable Admiral TV set into the kitchen on Friday afternoon so that our cleaning girl Willie Mae would not miss her favorite soap opera as she did her chores.

Friday, November 22 was no different.

Adjusting the antennae that zipped out oh-so-easily, Mom was grateful for this new lightweight TV set that miraculously eliminated any interference caused by appliances, cars or anytime a neighbor used his power drill.

With the set warmed up by 1:30 in time for As The World Turns,   Willy Mae settled into the Formica kitchen table to tackle the silver. Daubing the pink oily polish onto the ornate silver candy dishes and bowls, she rubbed vigorously, dissolving the black tarnish to magically reveal its true shiny and gleaming self.

Hooked on the soapy trials and tribulations of the show’s characters, Willie Mae’s concern that day was whether or not her hero would remarry his divorced wife.

Actress Helen Wagner had just said, “I gave it a great deal of thought Grandpa” when the show was interrupted.  Suddenly at 1:40, a Bulletin card flashed on the screen.

The disembodied voice of Walter Cronkite announcing: “In Dallas, Texas, 3 shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”

When it was done CBS cut to a commercial for Nescafe, but when it returned the country would never be the same. The last entertainment or commercial that anyone would see for 3 and a half days had run its course.

The silver would remain tarnished for another week.

A Solemn Sunday Morning

Sunday morning began solemnly – plans for the President’s funeral was the agenda for the day.

The kitchen radio, normally turned on most Sunday mornings as Mom prepared breakfast, had now been displaced by the TV  set, strangely still in the kitchen. The TV was like a guest who came to dinner and never left.

Out of Respect

Compared to Friday’s pandemonium and shock, Sunday was a quiet and subdued morning on TV  filled with religious services.

The usual assortment of Sunday morning cartoons was not an option. Today was not a day for Let’s Have Fun.

At 9 AM all 3 channels were broadcasting Richard Cardinal Cushing’s eulogy for the slain President, live from Boston.

The sound of his nasal voice cracking with pain about his “dear friend Jack” filled the morning airwaves. The unfamiliar intonations of a Catholic Church Service would normally carry a sense of the forbidden, but for today it was oddly not out-of-place in my Jewish home. Americans all, we each mourned out President.

Mom lit a cigarette and flipped through the morning newspapers. The weekend papers usually chock full of pre-Xmas shopping ads were devoid of all advertising. Department Stores were closed till Tuesday; even the supermarket had limited hours despite Thanksgiving being right around the corner.

Vintage Ad for Waldbaums Supermarket announcing the closing of its stores during the funeral services on Monday for JFK. NY Times Nov. 25, 1963

The country had come to a grinding halt. A country used to moving forward with the New Frontier was at a standstill. Our new President had declared Monday was to be a national day of mourning with offices, banks, schools, and colleges closed.

Vintage Memorial Ads for President Kennedy placed in NY Times Sunday Nov 24,1963 by NYC Department Stores (L) Gimbels (R) Saks Fifth Avenue

Vintage Memorial Ads for JFK placed in NY Times Sunday, Nov 24,1963 by NYC Department Store (R) S.Kleins (L) F.W. Woolworths

Though Monday would be a  welcome day off from school, it was oddly unlike any other. Relieved to put off my Arithmetic test until Tuesday, the day had neither the feel of a sick day or the fun of a snow day. Unlike a sick day, the balm of TV offered no distraction from our misery.

As disappointed as I was to miss Quick Draw McGraw and The Bullwinkle Show, my football fanatic father was equally disappointed that The Giants game was blacked out.

The sold-out football game between the NY Giants and the St Louis Cardinals at Yankee Stadium would still be played but the game would not be televised. Though WNEW radio promised to broadcast the game, Dad never got around to listening to it.

High Noon The Times They Are-A-Changin’

Headline of NY Times Sunday November 24, 1963

The most important event of the day would begin at noon when all networks would televise the funeral cortege from the White House.  The First Lady was scheduled to follow the caisson bearing the flag-draped coffin down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Rotunda where the body of the President was to lie in state.

With the funeral procession about to begin on TV, I  sat down for lunch.

Dad poured another cup of instant coffee and tackled the Times. With so much Kennedy coverage, he barely noticed that one of his favorite authors  Aldous Huxley the author of  Brave New World had also just died.

All The News That’s Fit to Print

Not surprising, The New York Times lead story was about President Kennedy’s body lying in state at the  White House.

Sharing the front page, but under the fold, was an article with the headline: “Evidence Against Oswald Described as Conclusive” written by Gladys Hill.

“Here’s one for you,” Dad said reading aloud from the newspaper. Mom looked up from the dishes with interest.

“Police officials said today they had amassed evidence enough to convict Lee Harvey Oswald of the assassination of President Kennedy,” Dad read.

NY Times Article Sunday November 24, 1963 “Dallas Police Describe Evidence Against Oswald as Enough to Cinch the Case”

Dad continued, as my ears perked up.

“’We’re convinced beyond any doubt that he killed the President,’ said Captain Will Fritz, Chief of Dallas Police Homicide Bureau after questioning Oswald and others.”

“I think the case is cinched,” Dad read on. “District Attorney Henry Wade said he planned to present the case to the grand jury next Wednesday or the following Monday. He though the case might come to trial in mid-January.”

Dad whistled: “That’ll be one heckuva trial! Imagine the press on that one!” Like most Americans, Dad felt relief that they had caught their man. In the great American tradition, justice would prevail.

I thought back to the picture they played over and over that past day and a half of the morose, puffy-eyed man wearing a T-shirt flanked by 2 beefy plains clothes officers as he entered the bedlam of the Dallas police station.

“Just like on TV,” I mused, “the sheriff had caught the bad guy!”

Stay Tuned…Don’t Turn That Dial

Satisfied, my attention turned back to the TV where a newscaster was reporting live from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, concerning the condition of  Joseph P. Kennedy, the late President’s father. Suddenly they switched from the overcast beach of Cape Cod to the now familiar,  overcrowded corridor in the Dallas police department.

I watched with great curiosity as Lee Harvey Oswald appeared in handcuffs, the T-shirt covered by a sweater, with 2 plain-clothed cops at each side.

What happened next came with such breathtaking suddenness as to defy description.

The nightmarish TV sequence filled with panic and pandemonium was over almost as soon as it started. A shot rang out and the news would never be the same.

Television, for years “promising a TV picture so real you’ll feel like you were there”  finally rang all too true.

Dad dropped the newspaper in disbelief.

Television was now more than the medium of choice it was the only medium anyone could envision capturing an event. When the weekend was over, print would never again challenge TV as the public’s primary source of information and authority.

The times they were a- changin!

A Brave New World indeed.

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

You Might Also Enjoy

JFK A Third Grader Remembers November 22, 1963

70 years ago NATO was born in the aftermath of WWII out of a desire to prevent WWIII.

Conceived out of necessity, this enduring alliance was initially forged to prevent Soviet expansionism. The shared democratic values of its members formed a unique bond. An alliance meant to provide reliability in an unreliable world.

For 70 years Europeans have known that America’s foreign policy and priorities would be consistent with theirs.

Until now

DonaldTrump’s flip flops and broadsides against NATO have rattled this long and formidable military alliance that largely defined the global post-war order. His veiled threats to pull out plays right into Putin’s hands.

From its Cold War inception, Russia has bristled at the formation of NATO, wanting nothing less than a dissolution of the organization. The North Atlantic Treaty was at heart a military alliance intended as a defense against the Russians.

It is likely Trump has never bothered to understand why the partnership was formed in the first place.

All roads lead to Russia.

The Hungry Bear

The fear of Soviet aggression and the spread of communism defined the post-WWII world.

Cast as the Evil Empire during the cold war, an expansionist Russia was viewed as a “hungry bear” whose insatiable appetite needed to be controlled.  The media was flooded with maps depicting the Soviet Unions aggressive tendencies appearing ominously, splotched in red, depicting the global pattern of the spread of the Red offensive

Convinced that comrades in the Kremlin were busy spinning a web of control,  hell-bent on forcibly enslaving free people everywhere,  the U.S. and her western European allies needed to contain the cunning Russian bear.

Or a cold war could turn very hot.

Bear Hug

WWII Soviet Allies (L) Life Magazine cover 3/29/43 featuring warm and fuzzy Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin (R) Life magazine cover 2/12/45 featuring our brave ally a Soviet Soldier courageously driving on to Berlin

The big chill almost made us forget that only a few years earlier  this big brutal Russian bear had been our warm and fuzzy teddy bear of a wartime ally

During  WWII,  no one could hold a candle to those brave Stalingrad sacrificing red white and blue Russians. Led by twinkly-eyed pipe smoking “Uncle Joe Stalin they were our comrades in fighting the Nazis.

Songwriters cheered and praised our Soviet comrades as we whistled “You Can’t Brush Off a Russian” and “Stalin Wasn’t Stall’in.” Selling the Soviets to us like a bottle of Pepsi, one ditty went:

“The Soviet Union hits the spot

12 million soldiers that’s a lot

Timashen and Stalin too

The Soviet Union is Red white and blue.”

The Big Chill  

As the war came to a close the Soviets and Americans converged in Berlin, toasting each other at their shared victory.

The guns fell silent in Europe in May 1945 but the post-WWII world would have very little peace. A hot war might have ended with those 2 fiery Atomic Blasts in Japan but another war a cold one began with our former allies in arms, the Russians.

By 1946 the world was changing at a dizzying pace.

Maps had been redrawn, swelling and shrinking the areas of countries creating new boundaries, as cards were re-shuffled and friendships dissolved. Like so many war born marriages, it turned out our grand alliance with the Soviets was more a marriage of convenience. Uncle Joe, our warm and fuzzy teddy bear quickly turned into a cold-blooded grizzly bear ready to gobble up crippled Europe turning its starving shivering population into godless Communists. As Soviet tanks angrily roamed Eastern European streets, Churchill warned of an Iron Curtain descending over Europe.

Our war born goodwill faded as quickly as Elizabeth Arden’s vanishing cream.

Better Dead Than Red

Convinced the Russians had embarked on an aggressive campaign to destroy our government, establishing the American Way of Life as ideal became even more crucial during this time contrasting it to the “Ruthless, Godless Communist” way of repression. We were to be on alert to the menace of Communism.

As the cold war was heating up a series of events in the late 1940’s pointed to the fact that the security of Western Europe was tied to the security of the U.S. The threat of Soviet invasion of Western Europe pushing further into the freedom-loving democracies hung over the continent.

As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazis had been and swiftly rerouted to those Godless Russian commies.

Germany, in fact, was a constant cause of concern.

After the war, Germany had been carved up into 4 occupied zones between the Allied victors of WWII. Berlin itself was divided up into Communist East Berlin and democratic West Berlin. But Berlin was stuck deep inside the Soviet-occupied parts of East Germany. West Berlin was a thriving, cosmopolitan city.  In Soviet East Berlin the destruction of the war was still visible, the people far from prosperous, with luxury items scarce. Every year tens of thousands of East Berliners fled to capitalist West Germany.

The fear was that the Soviets wanted Germany to be the communist centerpiece of Europe. With Germany a Soviet satellite, Stalin licked his chops with the thought of Western Europe falling under the domination of the USSR.  In June 1948 the Soviets imposed a blockade of Berlin in hopes of starving the Western Allies out of Berlin.

The same year the Soviets launched a coup in Czechoslovakia overthrowing a democratic government. They had already placed a communist government in power in Poland and extended its sway to every Eastern European country it occupied since 1945.

Atomic Blast

Adding fuel to the fire, America’s nuclear monopoly came to an abrupt end in 1949.

We were just digesting the Communist take over of China when on a hot summer morning in August the Soviets detonated an Atom Bomb sending a shock wave around the world. Many feared an impending war with Russia. As long as the aggression existed in the form of the Evil Empire and “their unrelenting drive to enslave humanity” the threat of an unwanted nuclear war would cast a long shadow.

The clear Soviet provocations created the urgency for the collective defense of Western Europe.

This was the grave backdrop as talks proceeded on a North Atlantic Treaty.

Europe was still clawing its way out of the destruction of the war and to be credible, any collective defense had to include the U.S. and Canada. After the war much of the world was economically shattered, returning home to cities that were often just rubble of broken bricks and smoldering wood, the desolate shell of a former city not yet done burning.

In our country, our economy was booming and there wasn’t a single building demolished by bombs, a brick displaced, or window broken and the only geographical scar was the one we ourselves had made on the empty deserts of New Mexico.

America had come out of the war as the only major industrial power not severely damaged, the richest country on earth.

President Harry Truman signing the North Atlantic Treaty which marked the beginning of NATO in a special signing ceremony on Aug. 24, 1949

European leaders met with U.S. defense, military and diplomates at the Pentagon exploring a framework for a new and unprecedented alliance.

All members agreed to defend one another – that is still the core of the alliance. It was a security pact stating that a military attack against one would be considered an attack against them all. NATO was both a military alliance  and also ideological.  These were all liberal democracies and the will to push back against totalitarianism and  Communism ran deep.

The North Atlantic Treaty, signed by twelve nations on a Monday afternoon in April of 1949 in Washington D.C., saw the United States accept the lead in the free world’s postwar resistance to Communist aggression and subversion.

We accepted our banner as leaders of the Free World with pride and purpose and commitment

Today

Today NATO is the strongest, most successful alliance in history

But it has never been just a purely military alliance. There is a special emotional bond between America and the European allies. It is a political alliance as well based on the common aspirations of its members of freedom and peace. As the NATO treaty states its members are determined to safeguard individual freedom and rule of law. These values are far from obsolete

But these principles are under assault today. Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, the terrorism of the Islamic State spreading from the Middle East to the capitals of Europe, authoritarian regimes developing nuclear weapons — as different as these challenges are, they have one thread in common: They  come from those who oppose the international order. They try to undermine or even change the rules that have governed the age of democracy and prosperity since World War II.

The democracies of NATO need to stand together to overcome these challenges.

Copyright (©) 2019 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

“Chinese Flu” or “Kung Flu.”  Pick one from column A,  one from column B. With both you get fevers and chills.

And racism.

Whatever you want to call it, Trump’s ignorant tweet referring to the Coronavirus as the Chinese flu smacks of bigotry. His all too predictable xenophobic hate and pathological need to blame the other is spreading among his loyal followers as fast as the coronavirus itself is. Following suit, a White House official referred to the Coronavirus as “The Kung Flu.”

It’s not the first time a finger has pointed the blame of an epidemic on China.

Just like today, in the winter of 1957, the war against a viral epidemic raged.

All but forgotten was the devastating Asiatic Flu of 1957.

Originating in China it went from an epidemic to a pandemic quickly. The worst flu outbreak since 1918, was an entirely new strain and there was no immunity. A strain of Avian flu, it disproportionately targeted young people along with the elderly and frail. Researchers scrambled for a vaccine.

Panic and fear swept the nation and a country looking to place blame somewhere pointed it towards the far East. The flu terrorized counties worldwide and even closer to home, my own family.

Nearly 30 years had passed since the last major influenza outbreak of the Spanish flu of 1918 and it took the world by surprise

It had been initially a quiet influenza season. However, by April newspapers began reporting that an influenza epidemic had affected thousands of Hong Kong residents starting rapid movement across the east with 100,000 cases in Taiwan by mid-May and over a million in India by June.

By  autumn health officials concerned about the Asian flu wrote ominously:

“Although we have had 30 years to prepare for what should be done in the event of an influenza pandemic, I think we have all been rushing around trying to improvise investigations with insufficient time to do it properly.

A Chilly Cold War Winter

The winter of 1957 would prove to be a very chilly one in my Cold war childhood.

While the flu was on the march and health authorities everywhere were girding for battle against this pandemic. The dreaded flu hit my own mother hard.

Despite all my Mother’s precautions by December she started sending out distress signals. Knocked out with the all too familiar quartet of body aches, fever, sniffles, and cough, our germ proof house had been invaded; Mom got the flu.

As obsessed as my father was with the Cold War, my mother was equally concerned about the war on colds.

To each end, they were constantly on alert for unseen, unknown, camouflaged enemies ready to insinuate themselves into our safe environment.

I was always told the best way to avoid contagious diseases, was to avoid any and all contact with anyone coughing or sneezing in your immediate perimeter. Like a heat-seeking missile, a careless sneeze, or an explosive cough could shoot troublesome germs in your direction at a mile a minute speed.

Choose One from Column A  and One From Column B

Because the Asiatic virus had originated in China, blame was pointed to the Far East.

Always convinced it was the sub gum chow mein that was the culprit for her cold, Mom was sure she had seen the waiter at Chung King Gardens, sneeze into her food. Dad, on the other hand, was sure the guilty party was to be found at Ming’s Chinese Laundry where Mom dropped off his shirts every week. Ming’s wife always seemed to have a hacking cough, as she sprayed his Van Heusen shirts with heavy starch.

Whatever the origin, that winter Mom came down not with a mere cold but with a nasty case of the Asiatic Flu that was spreading through the country.

My vigilant mother had read all the warnings in the newspapers and listened soundly to the radio reports. In early September CBS radio had enlisted Walter Cronkite to narrate a special report on the state of the flu explaining what was happening to combat the outbreak and what we could expect. It gave Mom the willys.

Everyone braced for the worst. Americans communities faced a grave emergency because of this flu. The public was was panicking- yet another invisible invader that could attack without warning. Like the Soviet Satellite Sputnik, it was traveling around the world at an alarming speed.

While the government was working like mad to get a vaccine available, that pesky little devil of a virus snuck into Moms bloodstream when no one was looking.

“Like the Communists takeover in a susceptible 1949 China  ” Dad grumbled derisively, “the flu had infiltrated the United States and established a beachhead in our very own home.”

It was all-out war.

Asiatic Flu

Asiatic flu was a new and highly infectious form of influenza which had originated in Red China.

Dad was certain this latest epidemic was true germ warfare, certain that Chairman Mao had something to do with the virus’s Great Leap Forward.

Previously, the Chinese had bitterly accused fair-minded Americans, of secretly using germ warfare during the Korean conflict, and now Dad was sure they were retaliating. The Chinese themselves were on the march towards massive power.

“The Red Army had a bloody record of aggression in Korea and Quemoy,” Dad griped, “and now their damn Commie Virus had invaded us.”

Fowl Play

The flu had brutally taken over much of the eastern seaboard this winter and like the insurgent Communists, posed a grave threat to the free healthy members of our house. Both situations required corrective.

Once Mom’s fever rose above 101, the cold war got hot.

Just as our government would eventually devise “Operation Mongoose,” a plan to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba , together my parents adopted a course of pre-emptive and covert action that they hoped would work. The flu had penetrated through our fortifications, and a can-do-decisive Dad had a battle plan of his own: Operation Chicken Soup.

His Mission:  intercept and render the flu inoperable.

Dad quickly mobilized and called for reinforcements.  Acute care services were brought in immediately.

On the right flank was family physician Dr. Epstein, a proponent of biological and chemical warfare. He was at a disadvantage in utilizing a flu vaccine. Imposing a containment policy for Mom, he ordered enforced bed rest, plenty of liquids and Bayer aspirin.

On the left flank would be my grandmother Nana Sadie, who would be deployed from Manhattan the next day at 0:800. A  decorated Veteran of the Flu Epidemic of 1918 she was armed to battle the enemy the best way she knew how- arriving loaded down with shopping bags filled with cans of disinfectants and a cache of secret ingredients for her chicken soup.

Dad barked orders at all of us: Were we doing all we could in combating infectious germs. How often had we washed our hands?  Or were we complacent, while the insurgents try to seize power?

Air Defense

 Immediately upon landing the following morning, my Nana wasted no time. She would take the offensive with the pre-emptive striking power of Lysol, Lestoil and Listerine, to immobilize and incapacitate any rogue germs.

Boots on the ground, mink hat still on her head, Nana Sadie had us all gargling with Listerine. The first line of infiltration was the throat. You had to strike at throat infections before the germs got a foothold.

The warning signal – a tickle in the throat- nature’s way of saying “Look Out- Danger Ahead: the bacteria is getting the upper hand! The throat is an open door for infection laying out a welcome mat for all kinds of germs,” Listerine ads cautioned ominously.

The next engagement was a full-frontal attack on dirt. Every counter, every surface in the house was scoured and sanitized.

Operation: Air Borne.  

 Nana was certain the air was filled with dust and germs which could then be inhaled. The menacing fact about this potent flu virus was that when scattered by an infected sneeze, or a soiled hanky, it could continue to live in household dust and infect the whole family with the flu even six weeks later!

With the knowledge gained from the 1918 Influenza epidemic, Nana explained, “spittle contains many little disease germs and when the spittle dries these little germs are set free, caught by the wind and begin to fly about.”

Therefore, reinforcements of Kleenex were constantly being supplied to the front lines.

Tucked into her sleeve, or balled up in her pocket, Nana never went anywhere without a tissue at the ready, her first line of defense against deadly germs.

To her, the invention of Kleenex was a modern miracle of science, rivaling sulfa drugs and penicillin in saving mankind. With the simple toss of a disposable Kleenex into a wastebasket, you were wiping out thousands of dangerous enemies, and saving countless lives.

When the miracle that was Kleenex first appeared, even the box itself was proclaimed a marvel of ingenuity, and modern design, “….. cleverly made to hand out automatically through a narrow slit, two tissues at a time ( the correct number for a treatment).”

 1918 Flu Epidemic

As a veteran of the first and worst flu epidemic ever, old fears and suspicion born of that war had scarred Nana Sadie for life. An otherwise healthy brother and sister both in their early twenties had perished in the epidemic.

The public, in 1918 was petrified of the Flu.

It was a panicky time when everyone and everything became suspect of contamination mirroring the Red Scare which had reached near hysteria that very year. Provoked by a fear that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent – a revolution that would destroy the American Way of Life, ordinary people became suspect of being Anarchists and Communists.

So it was with the Influenza when even everyday items such as handkerchiefs came under scrutiny and attack.

Those lovely embroidered, heirloom hankies that every proper lady, gentleman and well brought up child always carried- might well be aiding and abetting unseen armies of influenza germs, rendering your dainty, lace-trimmed hanky as dangerous as any incendiary device. Carelessness on your part and suddenly your monogrammed handkerchief, harboring germs, could be turned into a weapon of bio-terrorism threatening you and your terror-stricken neighbors with the dread menace of infection.

Fear ran so deep that handkerchiefs were stigmatized as dangerous transmitters of the flu, and people frantically resorted to using pieces of linen in their stead, which were then subsequently burned.

Although hankies eventually came back into favor, and Nana, like my mother, always carried an ironed and neatly folded hanky in her pocketbook, she would never dream of blowing her nose in one. Dabbing an eye at a three hanky movie maybe, but generally, handkerchiefs were rendered inoperable.

And if health wasn’t an incentive, vanity was. Kleenex promised the flapper it would keep her girlish figure. “Now I’m streamlined,’ boasted one young modern. “Carrying four or five hankies in my pocket during colds made my figure bumpy in the wrong places! Now I carry Kleenex and I’m in good shape again!”

Air Control

As head of tactical air control, Nana deployed the aerosol Lysol to fumigate the house of any biological agent, followed by the immediate opening up all the windows to let in plenty of frigid fresh air.

Sunshine and fresh air were the best deterrents to all illnesses Nana informed us.

Sick people she was convinced, needed air support, the more fresh air they get, the quicker they were likely to heal.

But only if you avoided drafts at all costs.

How you could distinguish between blasts of healthful, fresh Arctic air and dangerous drafts was beyond me. And don’t even think of raising the thermostat. Overheated homes were a recruitment center for pneumonia and TB.

Nana had definite ideas how the body worked and how it could be healed.

The open windows theory, heavily promoted in previous decades, went that people who breathe the same stale air over and overrun the risk of catching some dreadful disease, for along with the air, the lungs blow out tiny germs of sickness. These are too small to be seen and if there were plenty of fresh air in the room, they would rise up to the ceiling, float out the windows, be caught by the wind and carried high in the air where the hot sun would soon kill them.

If these germs can’t get out of the room they are apt to be drawn into the lungs of any person who isn’t well and there they are sure to grow and make that person very ill.

Her other strategy was a series of incendiary attacks. She would fight fire with fire.

Any remedy that made you perspire was good. You couldn’t possibly get well “until you worked up a good shvitz”, she believed, so a vaporizer was stationed next to Mom’s head, so hot it made the wallpaper perspire. Great puffs of mushrooming steam clouded the room so Mom couldn’t even be seen through the haze.

Fowl Ball

Jewish Penicillin

By themselves, these methods did not seem sufficient.

We were poised to unleash a powerful weapon to win the cold war- Jewish Penicillin.

Chicken soup, clear, sparkling, golden-colored, was Nana’s secret weapon. Antihistamine, decongestant, expectorant all in one, the golden broth would blast the virus to smithereens.

Chinese Wonton soup would be equally effective.

Copyright (©) 2020 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved

This morning I stumbled out of bed groggily to get to the 6:30am Senior shopping lalapalooza at my local Stop & Shop supermarket and I hit the jackpot.

It was nothing short of being like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep, racing through the aisles attempting to pack my carefully disinfected cart full of the most valuable items. There before me was a vision  – fully stocked shelves as far as the eye could see, with toilet paper and paper towels aplenty, the meat department brimming with packages to make any carnivore’s heart skip a beat and that most coveted of items, I scored a lone bottle of Purell.

After countless visits to grocery stores in the past few weeks where bare shelves have been picked clean, I felt the same wonder and glee of a Soviet-era visitor to a 1950’s American s supermarket, overwhelmed by the consumer abundance.

To now have that freedom of choice,  so uniquely American and unparalleled anywhere in the world suddenly snatched away, has been startling.

Long a showcase for the American way of life, supermarkets are a symbol of American affluence and freedom of choice. Each shopper free to select from the thousands of dazzling array of options.

During the Cold war, when Americans and Soviets were battling ideologically for the hearts and minds of people,  the American supermarket was held up as the very embodiment of our capitalist system and the American way. American housewives the luckiest and most liberated gals on earth were given free rein to pick and choose between the thousands of new and improved no-fuss-no muss giant-sized selections available to her.

She stood in stark contrast to the poor, downtrodden  Soviet woman already overworked from long hours in a factory who was forced to confront a barren grocery shelf day after day. Their bleak communist shelves so stark and empty compared to the technicolor snap crackle and pop of an American supermarket filled to the brim with the wonders of American corporate know-how.

These comparisons were constantly used in pitting the 2 systems against one another.

1955 was a milestone in food shopping history marking the 25th year of supermarkets and the silver anniversary was met with appropriate celebration.

“The Silver Jubilee Supermarket Cook Book” (“Dedicated to Maimie Dowd Eisenhower, the housewife of Americas No. 1 Household”) gushed that:  “The supermarket is a symbol of America’s attainment of a high standard of living through democracy, and is so looked upon as one of the great institutions in the world.”

Life magazine ran a  special issue devoted to the country’s “mass luxury”, food, described shopping in supermarkets as a major weekly ritual in American family life.

But, nothing paid homage to the supermarket more an article entitled The Lady is Queen of the Supermarket that ran Better Living Magazine  May 1955. A veritable love letter to the dazzling world of mid-century supermarkets and the fortunate housewives who frequented them.

Even now, when supermarkets account for nearly half the groceries sold in the US, they continue to dazzle the ladies with new products and new methods of using familiar products. The supermarket is a cornerstone of the American woman’s economic existence as well as her home life.

To the woman of today (1955) the grocery store is not a challenge but an inviting place to spend an hour. Every week her supermarket features a new product just on the market: a dehydrated potato preparation, perhaps or a new kind of processed cheez.

“By making the housewife queen for the hour she buys she does a better job of selling herself than a dozen eager clerks. She likes the privilege of pulling a can off a shelf”.

That privilege came right after our right to vote and doesn’t even need an amendment to the Constitution for it.

“She has put most of her imaginative faculties to work in the hour she spent doing the weeks shopping. She has made 40 or 50 decisions one way or another as to the purchases; she has envisaged certain products as they will appear when served hot at the table.

“Yes, the woman of today is self-reliant as never before, sweeping aside old barriers winning new freedom. And when she shops for food she wants to be free to choose for herself!

Modern American supermarkets were more democratic than old fashioned grocery stores according to the article, because, for example, self-service meat counters allowed the customers to choose the cut they wanted rather than submit themselves to the whim and favoritism of an autocratic butcher, which now reeked of Communism.

In winning the Cold war, supermarkets would prove to be as powerful a weapon as a missile to showcase America’s might.

Supermarkets could show the Soviet Union and the rest of the world just how mighty the US was, a physical palace devoted to the bounty of the land built on freedom, liberty, and capitalism.

The United States was itching to display this abundance. Since the average citizen living under Communism wouldn’t have access to a supermarket, the U.S. government brought the supermarket to the communists. In 1957, the United States created a Supermarket U.S.A. exhibit in then-communist Yugoslavia at the Zagreb International Trade Fair t. The exhibit featured a fully functional supermarket full of affordable frozen and packaged foods, and fresh produce airlifted in from the United States.

The results were all they could hope for. The Communist housewive’s heart weres sent a flutter. At least according to a New York Times article from September  8, 1957, reporting the event.

“Typical American Supermarket is the hit of the Fair in Yugoslavia” ran the headline.

A typical American neighborhood supermarket the first ever shown in a Communist country was the rage of Zagreb. Scorning the heavy machinery and outmoded consumer goods displayed by the Soviet Union Yugoslav housewives jammed the new US Pavillion at the Zagreb International Trade Fair to see for themselves how American women do their shopping in a “veletrznica” ( supermarket in Serbo Croatian)

Their comments and those of the husband’s present- left no doubt that this year’s U.S. exhibit was the hit of the show. “Look at the meat,” said one goggle-eyed visitor. “its all packed and assorted, the price is marked on it and you  just know its clean.

Say what you like but we don’t have such grapes in Yugoslavia,” a second woman remarked to her husband. “here we get those green sour grapes.

One Zagreb philosopher attracted by the crisp green vegetables flown over from the U.S. was moved to remark, “Here one can see the strength of the Americ soil, the influence of man over nature.

The most beautiful corn,” said one woman stroking the husk to assure herself it was real.

Compare this poor Soviet woman swooning over the produce to the lucky American counterpart where freedom was all around her. Aisle after aisle of fresh, pesticide produced produce, cheap hormone enhanced meat, chemical-laden processed foods, and sugary sweet cereals.

Shopping is a  Social Adventure

Shopping for food in the age of COVID19 is far from the social adventure of the mid-century housewife

“The supermarket is the woman’s store”  waxed The Lady is Queen of the Supermarket  article.

“Self-service is more than just a slick way of selling groceries to the woman customer it makes marketing day an adventure. To the woman of today, the grocery store is not a challenge but a relaxing place to spend an hour.

She enjoys mingling with her friends the store, and when she leaves the check out counter she has a feeling of accomplishment, not just the sense of having a dreary routine chore.

Yes, for my mothers and her generation, the supermarket shopping was an exciting, social adventure. For her daughter today, food shopping is still an adventure, but one she could never have imagined.