The Rose-Colored 50s

To the Editor: 
“Make America Great Again.” Four simple words. To letter writer James Schwarzwalder those words bring back the idyllic years of the 1950s, specifically the Eisenhower years.
Would the reality of that time match the rose-colored vision Mr. Schwarzwalder recalls? He writes of a time when America “kept its nose out of Vietnam and the Middle East.” If only. Eisenhower began our little adventure in Vietnam with the assignment of “advisors” to bolster the South Vietnamese government and the CIA was occupying itself with overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Mossadeck, installing the dictator Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran and setting the stage for the Iranian Revolution and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini.
On top of that, the CIA was working overtime installing fascist dictators throughout Central America as part of our war on communism. We were never a nation that minded its own business.
The 50s also brought us Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the infamous HUAC or House Un-American Activities Committee to harass innocent people and turn friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor.
We had a top income tax rate of 90 percent, compare that with Trump’s proposal to drastically reduce and eliminate taxes on the people, like Trump himself, who have benefitted the most from the advantages this nation has to offer and feel little to no need to give support to those who weren’t born into the right family, didn’t attend the right schools or know the right people to grease the skids of their careers, and who work in back-breaking occupations, making their pampered lives possible.
We had in the 50s, corporations that exported goods, now, some of these very same corporations export jobs to force the less fortunate into a race to the bottom against the modern incarnation of the slave like sweatshops of the Far East. Education is a wonderful thing, but we will always need the ditch digger and all the people who labor with their backs to make our way of life possible.
Mr. Schwarzwalder seems to overlook the contribution the labor movement made to his vaunted decade. Union membership was at a high point with about 30 percent of the workforce.
I submit for your consideration that when the working classes do well the whole society benefits and makes his rose-colored vision possible.
He rightly celebrates the construction of the interstate highway system, while conveniently overlooking that a Trump budget will have no room for a program to fix and rebuild those very same roads and bridges, water and sewer systems and the rest of the infrastructure that our way of life is built on and are crumbling before our very eyes.
The 50s were a pivotal decade in our history, but to draw the right lessons we have to look past the rose-colored imagery of “Leave It To Beaver” and try to see the totality of the times.