Three Artifacts Of An Alternative Future

Image courtesy of the author from 8th grade

Alternative history — not to be confused with “alternative facts” — is in vogue these days.

“The Handmaid’s Tale”, “The Man In The High Castle”, and the “Planet of the Apes” movies are just a few examples of the genre. They take real historical situations and ask “what would have happened in the long run, if just a few choices had been made differently than in real life?”

I suspect their popularity is partly due to American baby boomers of a certain philosophical inclination trying to grapple with the second big political “what-if?” of their lives.

Today, it’s “what if 70,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had made different choices on November 8, 2016?”

But, for the past fifty-some years, it’s been “what if more Americans had learned different lessons from the Sixties and early Seventies?”

To give you an idea of what alternative futures coming out of that era were possible, but rejected (actively or, more often, passively), consider some implications of the following three artifacts of my childhood, which I recently found in a box in my father’s attic. Think of them, though, not as relics, but as signposts — sometimes oblique — towards the future that we missed the first time around, but are trying to build for ourselves and our descendants.

“Humphrey’s Pledge To The People”

This is a flyer distributed by “Pennsylvania Citizens for Humphrey”, as part of its effort to win the Democratic Presidential nomination for former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey in 1972. I probably got the handout at a candidate forum at my high school.

I’m tempted to ask you to ignore my juvenile scribblings on the top of the flyer. Let’s just say they were a sign of a time that was far more intense and polarized than today. Graffiti-izing opponents was the least that a born-and-raised Republican kid like myself could do, growing up in a place where, five miles to the east, Democrats routinely won elections by 98%-2%, while, two miles to the west, Republicans won by the same margin. (Lesson for today: Compared to that era, partisan polarization today is a kumbaya song around the campfire.)

More interesting for modern eyes is the rest of the flyer, which lays out Humphrey’s platform. I’ll be darned if Bernie Sanders didn’t just copy and paste it into his 2016 stump speech. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton plagiarized most of it, too.

It reads:

• An end to the unjust and unfair tax loopholes enjoyed by the big corporations and the super-rich.
• Lower property taxes that are breaking the backs of the working families, the elderly, and the poor.
• Increase Social Security payments — right now — by 25%.
• Creation of a National Health Program to protect Americans of all ages, all incomes and all walks of life.
• Creation of jobs so those who want work and can work will have a job and the added personal dignity.
• An end to the unfair dumping of foreign-made, cheap labor goods that have stolen American jobs from our families.
• A never-ending commitment to make the “street where you live” a safe and decent place to live and raise kids.
• And [sic] end to the Nixon policy of government of the big money, by the big money and for the big money interests.

Remember, this was the platform of the primary moderate alternative Democrat to the eventual nominee (George McGovern). And it was written 46 years ago.

It also was the platform for a scarcity-driven society, an update of FDR’s New Deal response to the Great Depression.

What’s missing is any recognition of the post-scarcity country that America was becoming. It was written as if the Cuyahoga River had not caught fire three years earlier. As if 52,542 Americans had not been killed in automobile accidents the year before (almost as many were killed in the seven-plus years of the Vietnam War up to that point). As if matters of war and peace, racism, sexism, and homophobia didn’t matter to Democratic voters.

George McGovern eventually won the party’s nomination on a platform that recognized those realities. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he ran on an explicitly post-scarcity agenda. But it’s revealing that the Republican campaign against him emphasized his stands on non-economic issues. To conservatives and moderates, he was infamously labelled the “acid, amnesty, and abortion” candidate. Richard Nixon and friends already recognized that, to win, culture and status mattered more than money.

McGovern lost the general election in a landslide, getting only 39% of the popular vote.

After Barry Goldwater lost by an even larger margin eight years earlier, a critical mass of Republican activists chose to double-down on Goldwater’s conservative vision, even though it was anathema to many Republicans (including my mother). After 16 years of organizing, Goldwater’s ideological heir, Ronald Reagan, was elected president.

In contrast, Democrats by-and-large chose to treat McGovern and his alternative platform as an anomaly best forgotten, at least in the electoral arena. It was a path to an alternative future not taken.

“The Republican Heritage Calendar”

This is the “Republican Heritage Calendar” for 1968. It was published by the Republican Heritage Foundation, whose editor was Fred Schwengel, then a first-term Congressman from southeastern Iowa.

The calendar was designed to give daily reminders to Republicans that their party “has a history and heritage that is interesting, stimulating, and enriching”.

It was a history of which my childhood self was proud, that gave me plenty of reasons for being a diehard Republican.

But it’s also a history that much of the Republican Party of 2018 seems to have little desire to recall or emulate.

Here are a few random examples:

• The text under the environment-minded portrait of Theodore Roosevelt on the February page includes this TR quote: “The greatest questions before us are not partisan questions, but questions upon which men of all parties and all shades of opinion may be united for the common good.”
• January 9th: “1928 — Gov. Chas. E. Hughes defends elected Socialist right to serve in N.Y. Legislature”
• January 10th: “1878 — Sen. A.A. Sargent, Calif., introduced Women’s Suffrage Amendment”
• January 16th: “1883 — Congress passed Pendleton Act ot reform and improve civil service laws.” The first major attempt to “drain the swamp”.
• January 31st: “1865 — Congress passes proposal to free slaves; it becomes 13th amendment to Constitution.”
• July 12th: “1954 — Interstate highway program proposed by Eisenhower” The Big Daddy of all infrastructure projects.
• September 19th: “1908-–8-hour day extended for all government employees.”
• December 29th: “1897 — Law forbidding killing of seals in North Pacific passed.”
• December 31st: “1903 — Republicans announce record-breaking immigration into U.S.”

Be honest. If all you knew about the two parties was what’s described in these first two artifacts, which party would you be more inclined to support?

“Green-Peace-America”

This is an etching on a board, which I did in April 1970, as an eighth-grade school project.

It attempted to combine the symbols for peace (the lines that look like a tree trunk with three roots), the environment (the since-forgotten “ecology flag” on the left), and the United States.

To modern-day observers, the idea that a die-hard Republican kid would want to simultaneously stand for peace, the environment, and the American flag probably seems impossible.

But, in 1970, it was far from so.

I did the etching during the same month as the first Earth Day, which was sparked by the highly visible environmental catastrophes of the previous few years. My hometown had plenty of its own ecological problems. No one would dare swim in the Lehigh River as it wound through the city. And our metropolitan area officially had the 11th worst air quality in the country, thanks primarily to the smokestacks of Bethlehem Steel, Lehigh Portland Cement, and Mack Trucks.

It was also done around the time the first 19-year-old men drafted into the military via the lottery system were required to report for boot camp. Everyone my age knew someone who was on pins and needles about being sent to the still-raging Vietnam War. (For me, it was my only male cousin.) And, with no end to the war in sight, the thought that I and my fellow boys would soon have our fate decided by a ping-pong ball was never far from our minds.

And it was a time when the country seemed to be coming apart at the seams in ways that far outstrip today’s polarization. While fears of insensitive language and perverse ideologies on college campuses run high today, police and National Guardsmen were shooting and killing students on campus back then. (Four students were murdered at Kent State just a few days after this piece was completed. Two more were killed at Jackson State eleven days later.) In a way that children of warring parents are always looking for ways to promote family unity, so too did many kids my age yearn for the “e pluribus unum” we had been taught the American flag symbolized.

* * * * * *

My wishes for peace, ecology, and understanding were both widely held and, as it turned out, far from futile As detailed in Stephen Pinker’s new book, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”, the past fifty years have been far less violent than any time in human history. America’s air and water is unquestionably much cleaner and healthier. And, for those of us of a certain age, the recent increase in racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric and actions is abhorrent, but also reminds us of how things that were unimaginable fifty years ago are now taken for granted or, at least, accepted by a majority of the public. (I still remember the public uproar when “Star Trek” showed Captain Kirk kissing Lieutenant Uhura, the first scripted white-black kiss on national TV.)

But, today, partisan polarization has made it more difficult for kids — and grownups — to identify as Republicans and be publicly pro-peace and pro-environment . . . or as anti-abortion, anti-immigration Democrats. And that’s a big problem.

Imagine a future in which that polarization didn’t happen, where appeals by Democrats didn’t just focus on fights over slices of the economic pie, where Republicans bragged — with good reason — about their recent efforts to promote civil rights, diversity, good government, and the environment.

As these artifacts show, such a future was possible about fifty years ago. It still is today. It’s up to us who are still around from that era — plus our descendants (who now outnumber us) — to make it happen.