Radio Script #1280

Little Talks on Common Things
September 13, 1981

This broadcast is the 1280th of Little Talks, a program that WTVL has put on the air every Sunday since the autumn of 1948. Today begins the 34th consecutive year of this program devoted to Maine history, especially that of the Kennebec Valley.

When we opened last year’s program in September, 1980, we referred rather haphazardly to a few events that had occurred since the program first went on the air. Today let us review a bit more systematically the immense changes of those 33 years.

Of outstanding importance has been our nation’s participation in two wars: Korea and Vietnam. In the Korean War, where we were supported by troops of other nations in what was officially an international conflict to prevent further spread of communism in East Asia, we were not entirely successful, but we did assure the endurance of non-communist South Korea, though we could not prevent establishment of communist rule in the North.

Deplorably, Vietnam was the first war that the United States ever lost, and future historians may regard it as the most serious diplomatic mistake in two hundred years of our history. Since the American Revolution, we had been on the winning side in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish War and two world wars, and had seen the nation preserved by a bloody Civil War. Vietnam was a humiliating experience not only for the United States. but for the whole non-communist world, because it saw the dominance of communism throughout Southeast Asia.

Important as were the Korean and Vietnam wars, affecting a far larger number of American people since 1948 has been the continuance of deep and rampant financial inflation. The 1948 dollar, in purchasing power, is now less than 35 cents. In 1948 a substantial house could be bought for $10,000. A tender steak cost less than 50 cents. You could spend a day in a hospital for $25. Today’s 50 cent ice cream cones were then a nickel. Before 1948 we used to read with incredulity about Civil War bonds that paid 10% interest in the 1860’s. Now interest rates above 16% have become so common that people take them for granted. Now all the banks compete with each other by one glamorous scheme after another, to lure depositors into plans that all pay far more than the conventional savings bank 5~%, which itself is nearly twice as high as the same kind of interest in 1948.

Now think about political events since this program went on the air. In the very month that the program started in November 1948, Harry Truman upset all the polls and surprised the communications media by winning reelection to the presidency, to be replaced in 1952 by a general who had never before vowed allegiance to either Republicans or Democrats.

Then came the terrible assassinations of President Kennedy, his presidential candidate brother Robert, and Martin Luther King. Finally came Watergate, causing the only resignation of a president in office that has yet occurred in two hundred years of our history.

Outside the United States, the past 33 years have seen world-shaking events. In 1949 Mao Tse Tung started the first successful communist regime in Asia, the People’s Republic of China. A surge of nationalism took over the whole continent of Africa, giving birth to numerous new nations in what came to be called the Third World.

Unsuspected in 1948 was today’s tremendous impact of oil. It has made the once poverty-stricken nations of the Arabian peninsula and North Africa so wealthy that Saudi Arabia alone has one of the highest per capita incomes in all the world. Arab oil is today of tremendous influence in the western nations.

Of tremendous significance during the past third of a century has been the alarming increase in crime, violence and terrorism around the globe. We have already noted the American assassinations. For many years we have witnessed the religious war in Northern Ireland, costing thousands of lives. Palestinian terrorists haunt the Middle East, and guerrillas upset Central America. Airplane, hijackings, often resulting in highly paid ransoms, have become much too common. In most American cities it is unsafe to walk the streets after dark. Only a short time ago, Maine’s noted historian, Ronald Banks, was killed by hoodlums in front of his Miami hotel.

Before 1980 the takeover by terrorists of any American embassy was unthinkable. Yet the tiny nation of Iran defied the mighty United States by holding its embassy and more than 50 of its citizens hostage for over a year, and our nation’s financial cost for their final release was equivalent to ransom.

Perhaps the most important social chance in our country since 1948 has been the admission of blacks into egalitarian society. Since the decision of the Supreme Court, ordering school integration in 1954, we have actually seen more thorough acceptance of the decision in the south than in some of our industrial northern cities. And no one ever expected to see race riots in England that were occurring at the very time of the marriage of the Prince of Wales.

In Maine, since 1948, passenger trains have disappeared, and more and more the immense highway trucks have been taking over freight. In the whole area of transportation, the jet plane, unknown in 1948, now controls the air. In 1948 no one had a home TV set. I recall my first sight of television was of a tiny set put up in the lobby of Music Hall in Rockfeller Center, New York, in 1948. The first news broadcast I ever saw on TV was the Eisenhower inaugural, which I viewed as a guest in the University Club in Cleveland in 1952. Of course colored TV was a much later development.

During the last third of century has come the St. Lawrence Seaway, making water transportation from Great Lakes to the Atlantic more convenient and profitable.

Now consider a few notable advancements in medicine since 1948. Penicillin, the sulfa drugs, heart surgery, heart and kidney transplants, were all then unknown. Tuberculosis has become so uncommon that the sanitariums have closed. We now have immunization for numerous diseases, including measles. Here are a few other things unknown in 1948: the Polaroid camera, the postal zip code, mUltiple use of transistors, and the revolutionary use of computers. In fact, the period has seen the coming of the electronic age.

In the whole area of energy, of course, the greatest innovation has been the peaceful use of atomic plants. Allied to atomic energy, but not restricted to it, has come the increased awareness of the dangers of pollution. After Rachel Carson made clear what was happening to water, people demanded the cleanup of streams and lakes. Here in Maine that has meant, among other benefits, a return of Atlantic salmon to the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers.

The period has seen some paradoxical happenings. After the Surgeon General declared cigarette smoking dangerous to health and Congress demanded a warning on all cigarette packages and advertising, a decline in smoking was expected. What happened was such an expensive outpouring of ads in newspapers and magazines, often full pages in papers and double pages in magazines, that sales increased.

In respect to liquor, the past 33 years have seen equally contradictory actions. Medical science declared alcoholism a disease and the Food & Drug Administration proclaimed alcohol a drug, yet liquor sales continued to soar. On the other hand, when voting age allover the country was reduced to 18, a number of states passed legislation demanding higher age for legal use of liquor.

In the field of gambling, the once illegal practice has been substantially legalized and has seen the spread of state lotteries and big money casinos. This has caused a wave of moral reaction allover the nation. Noticeable has been the concerted attack on drunken driving bringing more stringent laws in many states.

Indeed one of the most dramatic changes since 1948 has been the wave of permissiveness in human behavior. We were reaching a stage where anything goes if you can get away with it. Colleges abandoned campus rules that had placed them in loco parentis, acting instead of parents. Curfew hours no longer controlled students at any hour of day or night. Intervisitation between boys and girls was not only tolerated, but expected. Then came co-ed living, at first on separate floors of dormitories, then in adjoining rooms on the same floor.

Parental control was relaxed, then in many homes became non-existent. Obvious became the truth of a statement made many years ago by Harry Emerson Fosdick. He said: “There is just as much obedience in the American home as there ever was. The difference today is that today the parents obey the children.” Permissiveness has now gone so far that we are seeing a conservative swing against it.

While some people have become despondent about our nation’s moral situation, I remain optimistic. A long life amid many changes have taught me that human behavior moves with a pendulum swing between extreme liberty and extreme restraint. We have just been through a period of swing in favor of ever-increasing individual right, and we are now due for a swing in the other direction, which indeed may some day go to excessive denial of individual rights. One thing we Americans can never seem to learn: the value of the Aristotelian golden mean, moderation in all things, never too much or too little, liberty tempered by restraint.

And with that review of events of the past 33 years, we are ready to resume next week our long series of broadcasts about Maine.

Year: 1981