Change

In the past year Tea Party enthusiasts have been seen on practically every national TV news program claiming through raised voices and signs that the U.S. today is NOT the same country in which they grew up. A number of Tea Party supporters in my home made the very same claim. The following list presents the way the U.S. was when most of those Tea Party activists were born and in which they lived as children during the late-1940s through the 1950s and into the 1960s. All these facts can be checked and verified through a minimum of searching online or in libraries.

• Annual Federal income tax rates ranged from 16 percent to 92 percent graduated in steps based on earned income.
• Trade unions constituted the dominant force in labor.
• Segregation and discrimination against blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals was legal; the Federal government enforced de jure segregation through regulations of the Federal Housing Authority and other federal agencies.
• Red lining (designating areas where people could not obtain loans or insurance because of race or other socioeconomic factors) by banks and insurance companies was commonplace and not prohibited by law.
• Land covenants prohibiting ownership and occupation by blacks, Orientals, Hispanics, and Jews were common in every state.
• Every southern and border state prohibited racial inter-marriage.
• All southern and most western states prohibited or sharply restricted voting rights for blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals.
• Race riots in major cities were common from the 1920s through the 1970s.
• In the South from the 1900s through the 1960s, lynching and murder were common means of repressing black people and resisting civil rights activism.
• Women and Jews were widely discriminated against throughout the country.
• Surgery relied on relatively primitive techniques when compared to those of the late 20^th and 21^st Centuries. Cancer was basically untreatable. Many infectious diseases were rampant, including polio and TB among others.
• Syphilis and gonorrhea reached epidemic proportions in many large cities, such as St. Louis, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago so that in most major cities across the country a blood test was required of all marriage license applicants to demonstrate they were free of sexually transmitted diseases.
• Dentists treated cavities with primitive friction drills; fillings were made with toxic dental amalgam materials like mercury.
• No state had effective anti-pollution legislation or regulations that protected the water or air. Air pollution from industrial sources adversely affected every major U.S. city, annually killing thousands of people with lung, heart, and other health problems. All American cities dumped raw or mostly untreated sewage into streams, lakes, and the ocean.
• Few cities had malls or suburbs until the early 1960s.
• We had few large medical research centers like Washington University Medical School, Johns Hopkins, or M.D. Anderson.
• The Republican Party was a centrist party of mostly moderate conservatives.
• The Democratic Party included virulent racists and segregationists bent on repressing black Americans.
• The political systems of most large cities were controlled by powerful political machines and bosses like Richard Daley in Chicago, James Curley in Boston, and Thomas Prendergast in Kansas City.
• Virulent Anti-Communism was the prevailing sentiment in the United States throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, causing many Hollywood actors, writers, and directors to be persecuted and blacklisted by right-wing bullies like Senator Joseph McCarthy for real or imagined political beliefs specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution.
• Organized crime was largely ignored by the federal government (from the 1930s through the 1950s) owing to the dictates of the FBI’s J. Edger Hoover.
• The U.S. Department of Defense was testing nuclear weapons in air and ground bursts and required many thousands of military personnel to be on the ground within the radiation zone between three to five miles from the blast site, resulting in thousands of unnecessary cancers and premature deaths; thousands of those soldiers were subquently refused medical treatment by the Veterans Administration after their records mysteriously disappeared.
• Millions of Americans in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado downwind from the nuclear blasts were irradiated by nuclear fallout.
• In the decade of the 1950s, the U.S. population was 151,684,000, life expectancy was 71.1 years for women and 65.6 years for men, and the average salary was $2,992.
• Two-term Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported the era of big government by expanding the Cold War, maintained high income taxes on the rich, made expensive nuclear weapons a high defense priority, launched the very expensive Space Race, signed legislation that greatly expanded the Social Security program, supported and signed the first Civil Rights Acts, and initiated and spent billions of taxpayer dollars on the Interstate Highway System that was funded by higher gasoline taxes.
• By the early 1960s, all states participated in Federal welfare programs with general welfare payments (Aid to Families with Dependent Children — AFDC), food stamps, special payments for pregnant women and young mothers, and federal and state housing benefits.

Is that the country to which Tea Party activists want the U.S. to return? Because that was the country in which most of them were born and in which they grew up.