THE GREAT DIVIDE - Crumbling American Dreams

[Purveyor]

My hometown — Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050 — was in the 1950s a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.

But a half-century later, wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the Port Clinton High School lot next to decrepit “junkers” in which homeless classmates live. The American dream has morphed into a split-screen American nightmare. And the story of this small town, and the divergent destinies of its children, turns out to be sadly representative of America.

Growing up, almost all my classmates lived with two parents in homes their parents owned and in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone else’s first name. Some dads worked in the local auto-part factories or gypsum mines, while others, like my dad, were small businessmen. In that era of strong unions and full employment, few families experienced joblessness or serious economic insecurity. Very few P.C.H.S. students came from wealthy backgrounds, and those few made every effort to hide that fact.

Half a century later, my classmates, now mostly retired, have experienced astonishing upward mobility. Nearly three-quarters of them surpassed their parents in education and in that way advanced economically as well. One-third of my classmates came from homes with parents who had not completed high school and, of that group, nearly half went to college.

Low costs at public and private colleges across Ohio were supplemented by locally raised scholarships — from the Rotary Club, the United Automobile Workers, the Junior Women’s Club and the like. Although the only two black students in my class encountered racial prejudice in town and none of their parents had finished grade school, both reached graduate school. Neither for them nor for our white classmates was family background the barrier to upward mobility that it would become in the next century.

more...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/crumbling-american-dreams/

[Igel]

1. I wonder how he knows some of his facts.

If I had to say anything interesting about my graduating class I couldn't. Even using the information that's class officers have from keeping contact, etc., only shows those who want to be kept contact with. Seldom the real losers. Or those who committed suicide.

His numbers are high for the 1950s on average. Way high. Most had better educations--in the sense of finishing high school when their parents didn't, but that was mostly a function of state law and employer requirements. But college wasn't something that most kids went to.

It's very easy for rhetorical purposes to conflate a specific case and make it somehow universal. The '50s and '60s saw a phenomenal increase in wages and employment that ended not recently but in the '70s. And it really depended where you were, even then.

My community was around in the '50s, and had a "working middle class" a bit larger than that in the OP, due to a single dominant industry and ancillary industries that serviced it--plus small businesses that provided services to those who worked in those industries. But growing up there and seeing the sheer number of adults that were raised in the area and then had kids, the attitude to higher ed, I'd be surprised if 5% of the kids from the class of '60 went to college. There was no upward mobility. There was no downward mobility until the '70s. You got the same kind of job your father had. In some cases you wound up in the same house. I graduated in '77. My brother in '66. Same kind of college attendance rate.