Trump and Gatsby

When were we great??  We were great after World War II.   

Those were the "good old days."

Of course, they weren't so good if you were black.   That was the time of Jim Crow segregation.  Separate water fountains for "colored".  Black people couldn't stay in most hotels.   High school and college teams, even here in Oregon, needed to make special arrangements so that black athletes would have a place to eat or spend the night when traveling.  Back of the bus.  All white juries.  The "Solid South" for Democrats.

And it wasn't so good if you were a woman and needed to support a family.  There were men's jobs and women's jobs, and there were separate sections in the Help Wanted sections of newspapers.

And it wasn't so good if you were Asian.  Or Jewish. Or Hispanic.  Or gay.  Or disabled.

But it was a pretty good time to be a white male high school graduate in America.   

My father was an elementary school principal beginning in 1949.   He was a veteran of the Army, served in combat in Europe and survived, and finished his bachelor's degree and began working on a masters.   By 1955 he bought a house in Medford:  3 bedrooms, 1 and a half baths, 1,300 square feet, one car garage, on an 8,700 square foot lot.  It cost $14,000.  

What is important for American

Principal's home in neighborhood of mill workers

greatness is that it was in a neighborhood of similar homes and the homes were lived in by people like us: families headed by lumber mill factory workers,  married couples, 1 to 3 kids, the mother were homemakers.   By 1955 my father had been a school principal for 8 years and we had the same middle class lifestyle as similar families headed by men who did factory work.   Everyone in my neighborhood would consider themselves "middle class."    

Best Cars in the World

Our family had a 1955 Ford sedan, which we traded in 1958 for a Ford station wagon.   Our cars were like everyone else's in the neighborhood.

Today school principals earn about $100,000 and lumber mill workers earn about $35,000.  School principals have stayed solidly middle class.  Mill workers have fallen way behind.

Tokyo's Industrial districts: firebombed

That era was unique in history. 

Germany and the USSR had destroyed each other.   The American Air Force destroyed industrial Germany and Japan.  Japan had destroyed China and Korea.  Germany had destroyed all of Western Europe and most of the industry of Britain.  The rest of the world--India, Indonesia, Latin America, the Middle East--was 3rd World.   

Everyone was destroyed but us, and everyone else was busy trying to dig out and get re-established.   They weren't competition.   They were barely even a market for our stuff, but we didn't need them.  We made stuff for us.   It was just us.  

That was American exceptionalism in a way that really mattered.   We were the only industrial nation not buried in rubble.

If you were an American and white and male you were on top.  The Soviets still had a military but it was far away in eastern Europe and couldn't hurt us and for a while America alone had the atomic bomb and we had proven we would use it.   We had the power to use if again if we wanted and no one could stop us other than our own restraint.  The products of American factories were the best there was so we could sell stuff for a good price.  

Signing surrender on USS Missouri

Postwar America was "great."  American military on top.   American workers on top.  American men atop women.  Every white man, no matter how desperate his situation, was atop any black man.   It was great to be a white man in America.   To paraphrase Donald Trump as he currently concludes his rallies, we had won and for a while we would win, win, win, win, win, and win so much that we got tired of it but we would keep right on winning. 

We were great from 1945 until October 4, 1957.   That was it.  That golden era of greatness lasted 12 years.  That day the Soviets put up Sputnik and America had a realization.  The Soviets had the bomb and they beat us in the space race.  We weren't great anymore.  Now we had competition and they were as good as we were, at least in chess, math, science, and putting a satellite into space.

But Trump says we can go back.  We can make America great again.  We can return to that period in the past when we were rich, special, strong, exceptional: great.

Trump is as bright and gaudy and wealthy and confident as the Jay Gatsby character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, and Trump's vision of America's potential is as real as a bright green light flashing "million dollar jackpot" at a Trump casino, or the potential of real estate riches learned at Trump University, or a glorious future when China, Japan, and Mexico send factories back to America.  Trump is giving us a glimpse of what he envisions and Americans can remember, and we will win, win, win and things can be like they were.   F. Scott Fitzgerald understood Gatsby and Trump:

Gatsby's green light on the horizon.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  Ito eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .And then one fine morning--    So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Trump believes, and he can make a great many Americans believe.