How to Make America Great Again
President Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” may mean more to someone my age than it does to young people. Why? Because I grew up in an America that was great, America in the 1950s. The 1950s was our last normal decade. Almost everyone, rich or poor, white or black, lived by standard middle class values. The country was safe, problems in school were running in the halls and talking in class, and entertainment meant “Father Knows Best” and “Leave it to Beaver.” “Gay” meant “happy” and blacks were “colored people” who were known for wonderful service not shooting each other. That America’s proudest achievement was a vast, blue-collar middle class. A guy with or often without a high school degree could get an industrial job that paid enough so he could get married, have kids and give his family a middle-class life on one income.
Making America great again means re-creating that country. But if that is our goal, we will fail. America in the 1950s was the afterglow of an earlier America, America in the Victorian period. The people we must turn to and learn from are our ancestors from the second half of the 19th century. They succeeded in doing what we have to do again, namely turn a very rough country into one where almost everything worked well, as well at least as is humanly possible.
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in the 1830s, England and America both faced massive social problems. Perhaps the most challenging was rampant alcoholism. Americans lived on bacon and whiskey, largely because those two products could be made cheaply by rural people and sold at high prices in cities. England lived under the curse of “gin lane.” Until gin became popular in the 18th century, poor people couldn’t afford to get drunk very often. When gin lane opened, the shop signs read, “Drunk for hapence, dead-drunk for a penny.” That the lower class could afford, and did, massively.
At the same time, industrialization was driving people off farms and into cities, where whole families went into the mills: the long childhood we still enjoy was a Victorian creation (previously, childhood ended at about age 8). Abortion was rampant, as were infanticide, theft, wife-beating, and murder. Few lower-class people went to church, and both the lower and upper classes had a value system based on instant gratification.
The Victorians changed all that. They did not do so through government but through vast popular movements, of which the temperance movement was perhaps the most prominent but by no means the only one. These movements were largely created, led, and manned by women. Victorian women were not chained to the stove, but because those in the middle and upper classes did not work for money they had time to create and lead these movements. And what they did worked: the incidence of social problems steadily declined through the Victorian age. Since the 1960s, they have steadily increased. That should tell us something.
The greatest social historian of the Victorian era was the late Gertrude Himmelfarb, with whom I had the pleasure of talking more than once. She did not hesitate to contrast the Victorians’ successes with our failures. Her books offer the guides we need in order to repeat our Victorian ancestors achievements, once again turning a rough society with mounting social problems into, well, another great America. I call the movement we need in order to make America great again Retro Culture, and I have published a small book with that title in hope of sparking such a movement.
“Make America Great Again” is a fine slogan, but if we are actually to do that, we need to do more than re-elect President Trump. No government can alone reverse our country’s decline. We must all join together in a popular movement, Retroculture, the goal of which is to repeat our Victorian ancestors’ successes by learning from them. The knowledge of what works is there. Our task is to revive and apply it.