FDR, Gladys Cooper, and all that

National Review, April 30, 2007 by Florence King

SPEECHIFYING politicians have always raised hosannas to "our children," but in the last few years something new has been added. Now they say "our children and grandchildren." They make such a point of this that you would think someone was holding a gun to their heads.

Someone is. The addition cropped up when aging Baby Boomers started becoming grandparents and wanted this great feat officially recognized as yet another unique contribution of their fabulous generation. Captives of their own gargantuan narcissism, they firmly believe they are the first generation to get old in new, trend-setting ways, which is why ads for financial planning show them on beaches tossing dictionaries away in the sand because they contain unflattering synonyms for "retirement."

Boomer Nation will brook no competition. Their allies in the media and the social sciences--i.e., themselves--have seen to it that post-Boomer generations are deprived of catchy names, giving them unimaginative file-folder abbreviations like Gen X and Gen Y so they won't get any fancy ideas about being a Generation. As for people born in the low-birthrate Depression decade that immediately preceded the Boomers, we have nothing to fear but being portrayed as a day late and a dollar short.

Being born in the 1930s meant turning 30 in the 1960s when the Boomers were noisily proclaiming that nobody over 30 could be trusted. It meant being a member of the Marlboro Generation while Boomers smoked pot and a member of the Diaphragm Generation when Boomers went on the Pill. It meant turning 40 in the 1970s when Boomers announced that 40 was the new 30; having the menopause in the 1980s when feminist Boomers said menopause was irrelevant; taking out Social Security in the 1990s when Boomers said 60 was the new 50; and using a walker in the 00s when 70 feels like the new 90 and Boomers are throwing dictionaries all over the beach and braying "Realize your dream of starting a new business at 64!"

Nonetheless, I wouldn't trade my birthdate because the 1930s marked the real turning point in American life and I'm glad I was shaped by them.

Memories of quaint things that were more important than they looked ...

There were few self-service grocery stores. You told the counterman what you wanted or gave him your list, and he climbed a ladder and got it for you. There was no cash register; he wrote the prices on the brown paper bag and added them up, then spun it around for your mother to check. Two people getting the same total without a calculator, and a four-year-old watching ...

The first time the child noticed the milk bottle ...

It was glass, topped with a dome containing a beige liquid darker than the white milk below. Every child asked why, and every mother replied, "The cream always rises to the top." Saying that to a child today would land you in rehab, where you would learn that the way to build self-esteem in children is to teach them to sing, to the tune of "Frere Jacques": "I'm terrific, I'm terrific! Look at me, look at me!"

Drugs were sold in drugstores ...

We were as innocent as Victorian ladies who used arsenic as a facial astringent, but like them we lived on the edge. You could buy paregoric over the counter if you signed the drug book. Mothers rubbed it on a teething baby's gums, giving a whole generation an early start on heroin. Had we known, we could have boiled it down for morphine but we thought morphine was just something doctors in movies gave to dying grandes dames like Maria Ouspenskaya ("She's comfortable now").

The 1930s had no "drugs" and no "addicts" because we were America's last Insensitive Generation--we said dope fiends. Like a little learning, a little sensitivity is a dangerous thing. Lay it on with a trowel as the Boomers have trained us to do and the square majority will relax and give us more of what we are trying to get less of.

A touch of class ...

Living through the Golden Age of movies and seeing Fred Astaire in white tie on a regular basis, over and over in movie after movie, would stifle even the most cloddish proletarian instincts. It did just that; Americans, still a largely rural people, acquired polish at the movies. Despite the Depression, or more likely because of it, many movies of the 1930s were about rich people, played to perfection by casting-office aristocrats like Adolphe Menjou and Gladys Cooper. Audience members, most for the first time in their lives, saw how the privileged conducted themselves; how they dressed, talked, walked, sat, and of course, crossed their legs.

The most eager students of celluloid couth were teenage girls, for whom movies were a finishing school where they studied the finer points of how to serve tea, how to free a hand from a long white kid glove without taking it off, and how to answer the door like Myrna Loy ("Do come in"). Gradually an awareness of the way nice people did things sank in, until the concepts of de rigueur and comme il faut were understood even if the words were not.

The Hollywood of the 1930s taught America how to behave. Unfortunately, today's Hollywood is still doing it.