The history books tell a story that moves over the years smoothly, with the giant sweep of change readily discernable. But that's not how we live life. We live life one day at a time and at that petty pace we don't see change very easily. To really see how much as changed we need to look back aways and stop time for a moment to compare what we see then with what we see today.
Fifty years. Half a century. Five decades. That's how long it's been since Dwight Eisenhower was president, televisions were just becoming common household items, and Senator Joe McCarthy was hunting for Communists wherever he thought he might find them. The year was 1954.
Viewed from here some things look strange and quaint. Other things look distressingly familiar.
Today we're told that every seven seconds another Baby Boomer turns fifty. We're told that the Boomers will transform the way we deal with senior citizens. Back in 1954 they were transforming the way we dealt with schools.
Then the earliest of the Baby Boomers were just hitting eight and in the second or third grade. Teachers and school administrators and school boards were just becoming aware that there were millions of new young boys and girls that would be streaming into their schools in the years ahead. The schools weren't ready.
The schools weren't big enough. They didn't have enough desks or books like those classic readers with Dick and Jane. Dick and Jane themselves look kind of funny today, kind of like the want ads of the time that were divided into "Help Wanted - Men" and "Help Wanted - Women" and which routinely listed age requirements for positions.
Dick and Jane were very white and very small town. I lived in cities most of my life and I never quite related to them. They lived in a world where there was no subway, for gosh sakes.
Those Dick and Jane readers are gone now. They're replaced with politically correct, state-approved, get-ready-for-the-standardized test readers that are just as unrealistic in their own way as Dick and Jane were. In any case, school administrators had something more pressing to worry about in 1954.
On May 17, 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated schooling violated the US Constitution. The ruling outlawed "separate but equal" facilities. No one was exactly sure how the schools should respond.
The schools weren't the only institutions that were segregated. Whites and African-Americans (who were called Negroes in most of the press then) couldn't work side by side in factories in many places. The Wall Street Journal carried a story about the opening of the "first big all-Negro factory" in South Carolina.
Viewed from 2004 we can say that the laws have certainly changed, but some things still look the same. According to a recent New York Times article, "70 percent of black students attend schools in which racial minorities are a majority, and fully a third are in schools 90 to 100 percent minority."
Whatever was happening at school, Americans were going home to very different houses in 1954. A desirable middle class house sported knotty pine paneling and 800 square feet of living space.
By 1954 the move to the suburbs was well under way. More families had cars than ever before and there was a rush to build the highways that the cars would use. The cars themselves weren't very fancy. Most were stick shifts and hardly any had a single power feature.
Inside the house there were all kinds of new convenience items. In 1954 Swanson TV dinners and fish sticks were new. Televisions, though, had just moved up the adoption curve and into the mainstream. By 1954, sixty percent of the houses in the US had a television. That's about the same percentage that has Internet access today.
Those televisions carried news reports of that day in March when five Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire on a session of Congress. Five members of congress were wounded, but all recovered. No one called it a terrorist attack. It would be decades before that word became a staple of news coverage.
The biggest international story of the year was in what was then called French Indo-China. On May 7 a supposedly ragtag army defeated crack French troops at Dien Bien Phu. The French would soon leave Indo-China and the land would be divided into North and South Viet Nam. But in 1954, hardly anyone had even an inkling of what lay ahead, or of the role television would play in bringing another war in that place into America's living rooms and, ultimately, helping to end it.
There were glimmerings of what was to come though. Television was just learning the art of news. It was just beginning to televise important events so that individual citizens could be at least partial witnesses to history. And in 1954, television would play a role in ending the career of one of the most infamous of American politicians, Senator Joe McCarthy.
In April the so-called Army-McCarthy hearings began. They were conducted by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Senator McCarthy who charged that the Army was blocking the committee's attempts to uncover communists in the military.
The were covered by newspapers and radio also by television. Television was new to the mix and it allowed anyone with a television set to not just hear Senator McCarthy's statements, but also to see how he acted and how he reacted to opposition. Along with other events and some significant opposition to McCarthy, those views helped give other Senators the courage to act.
On July 30, a resolution of censure of Senator McCarthy was introduced. The charges were for conduct unbecoming a Senator. On December 2, McCarthy was condemned by a vote of the entire Senate.
The thing about 1954 is that it wasn't an especially momentous year. There were some momentous events, to be sure, like the Brown versus Board of Education decision and the French defeat in Indo-China. But it was hard then to see which events and trends would stand out when viewed from fifty years away.
Then, as now, most people got on with what they had to do, doing the best they could, day after day. Then as now they helped fashion a world that would look strangely familiar and passing strange viewed from the distance of half a century.
