Making Citizens’ Lives Better

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THE GIFTED GENERATION
When Government Was Good
By David Goldfield
Illustrated. 534 pp. Bloomsbury. $35.

Approaching the midpoint of this good-hearted book, David Goldfield pauses to reflect on the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers, who, to Brooklynites, “were less a baseball team than part of the family,” whose players “lived scattered about the borough among their fans.” It’s a vanished world, one in which the Dodgers would soon move to “new houses, new roads, new schools, new infrastructures and new lives” in California. Evoking, and mourning, that world — sometimes with appealing personal stories — helps drive “The Gifted Generation,” which Goldfield says is intended as “a compelling brief for government activism on behalf of all Americans.”

The phrase “gifted generation” refers to the boomers, although with expansive actuarial boundaries. The first wave, born in the 1940s, might have watched the Dodgers in Ebbets Field; they would lead very different lives from those born in the 1950s. Many of these men and women, now well past middle age, were “gifted” in the sense that they benefited from the gifts that were given to their parents, chief among them the G.I. Bill of Rights, an enormous jump-start that provided World War II veterans with the means to go to college, buy a house and join the growing, and comfortable, middle class. “Of the many gifts to the gifted generation,” Goldfield writes, “this federal policy was among the finest. It fulfilled both the short-term economic needs of the nation and the long-term educational needs of a transforming economy.” This is cheering stuff, a reminder that America, which was already a great nation, became a greater nation when government policies were able to help release the potential of its citizenry.

These gifts, though, were by no means universally bestowed. African-Americans got shortchanged by agencies that administered the G.I. Bill; private colleges kept control of their admissions policies; and minorities continued to face exclusion and quotas. (Goldfield’s pages are filled with freshly unearthed nuggets, like the fact that in 1951, American Airlines ordered its ticket agents to segregate passengers.) Nor were these gifts guaranteed to last: For instance, in terms of careers and incomes, children no longer do better than their parents, numbers that declined sharply between 1940 and 1980.

In these early stages of the Donald Trump era, there’s something almost old-fashioned in the notion that government can, and should, work to make life better. If that’s an idea whose time has gone, Goldfield points his finger at President Ronald Reagan, who liked to say, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” (Bill Clinton, in his 1996 State of the Union speech, said in Reaganesque style that “the era of big government is over,” though he added that “we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”) The aim of “The Gifted Generation” is to make a reader ask what has been lost, and why.

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Goldfield, the Robert Lee Bailey professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has a romantic view of three presidents who, apart from having been reared in rural America, could not have been less alike: Harry Truman, a New Deal Democrat, forced (after the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt) to come to terms with postwar America; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman’s successor, a five-star general and middle-of-the-road Republican, who preserved the status quo; and Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan, whose presidency promoted antipoverty programs as well as major advances in civil rights and health care, but who was consumed by the divisive Vietnam War. All three, Goldfield believes, moved the government “to extend the pursuit of happiness to a broader population,” and all three “perceived that the nation could not be whole until everyone had the opportunity to succeed. They knew from personal experience that government was not only good but also necessary to address society’s inequalities.”

If Reagan Republicans have tried to persuade voters that government was bound to make life more complicated through aggressive regulation, and more expensive through taxation, Goldfield lets Lyndon Johnson offer a rebuttal: “Does government subvert our freedom through the Social Security system?” Johnson asked in a 1964 Saturday Evening Post essay. “Does government undermine our freedom by bringing electricity to the farm, by controlling floods or by ending bank failures?”

Having made this argument, and making it repeatedly, Goldfield also embarks on a familiar — perhaps too familiar — tour of landmarks of postwar America:the Kinsey report on women, which “created a storm of controversy”; the theories of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who encouraged parental laissez-faire; the life and times of Betty Friedan, whose influential “The Feminine Mystique” grew out of a questionnaire sent to her 1942 Smith College classmates. (Another nugget: At Smith, Friedan, née Bettye Goldstein, worked on a college play with Nancy Davis, the future Mrs. Reagan.) But did he need to say that Mary Tyler Moore’s television program, which debuted in 1970, “reflected a major transformation of public perceptions of women in the popular culture”? If that material makes up another, less interesting book, Goldfield does return to the idea of benevolent governance with Vannevar Bush’s argument that “science is a proper concern of government”; he notes that the National Institutes of Health “played a critical role in ensuring that the polio vaccine was ultimately safe and widely available.”

In a style that often relies on bold assertions, Goldfield is bound to assert some clunkers. For instance, while it’s true that Truman, as a senator, attended some of Justice Louis Brandeis’s celebrated “teas,” and that both were suspicious of Wall Street, the claim that it was “perhaps” Truman’s “closest friendship” is insupportable, even with the “perhaps” qualifier. When he writes that Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” was “the 20th-century version of ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ of ‘lighting out for the territory,’” one can only wonder why his editor didn’t stop him.

Nonetheless, the book that Goldfield set out to write, and finally did write, makes its case. You do not have to be Bernie Sanders to be concerned that among the 21 wealthiest nations, the United States “is the only country in which sick days are not required by law.” On the other hand, it’s not useful to assert that life expectancy in the former East Germany is higher than in the United States. That’s true enough, but a closer look at life expectancy statistics in the West suggests that they may not mean very much: for instance, residents of Monaco seem to live longer than anyone (89.4 years); the United States, at 80 years, surpasses Denmark, at 79.5 years. If the boomers’ successor generations — from Gen Xers to millennials — have been affected by ebbs and flows of government activism, they’ve also been affected by enormous shifts in demographics, advances in technology and the growing wealth of nations far from North America.

Still, Goldfield is right to point to the risks of government’s increasingly recessive role, and to make one worry how it will play out by the time the millennials become grandparents. “The major difference between the time the gifted generation came of age and the present is that the federal government’s role as the great umpire, the leveler, has diminished,” he writes. That carries with it the suggestion that, without an umpire, a society may be forced to function without the rules that help to guarantee order, fairness and, as the Constitution put it so well, “the general welfare.”