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President Obama Meets Civil Rights Icon Ruby Bridges

Posted by William Allman at the White House Blog

When Ruby Bridges visited the Oval Office President Obama told her, “I think it’s fair to say that if it wasn’t for you guys, I wouldn’t be here today.”

November 14, 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of six-year-old Ruby’s history-changing walk to the William Franz Public School in New Orleans as part of court-ordered integration in 1960. Six years after the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education declared that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional, this event represented a victory for the American Civil Rights Movement.

Bridges was at the White House to see how a painting commemorating this personal and historic milestone looks hanging on the wall outside of the Oval Office. American artist Norman Rockwell was criticized by some when this painting first appeared on the cover of Look magazine on January 14,1964; now the iconic portrait will be on display throughout the summer of 2011 in one of the most exalted locations in the country.

President Barack Obama, Ruby Bridges, and representatives of the Norman Rockwell Museum view Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” hanging in a West Wing hallway near the Oval Office, July 15, 2011. Bridges is the girl portrayed the painting. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The President likes pictures that tell a story and this painting fits that bill. Norman Rockwell was a longtime supporter of the goals of equality and tolerance. In his early career, editorial policies governed the placement of minorities in his illustrations (restricting them to service industry positions only). However, in 1963 Rockwell confronted the issue of prejudice head-on with this, one of his most powerful paintings. Inspired by the story of Ruby Bridges and school integration, the image featured a young African-American girl being escorted to school by four U.S. marshals amidst signs of protest and fearful ignorance. The painting ushered in a new era in Rockwell’s career and remains an important national symbol of the struggle for racial equality.

“The Problem We All Live With” by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). On loan to the White House from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The painting will be on display outside the Oval Office from until October 31, 2011 before rejoining other works from the museum in a traveling exhibition, “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell.” (Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing Company, Niles, IL)

Rockwell received letters of both praise and criticism from Look readers unused to such direct social commentary from the illustrator. Rockwell would revisit the theme of civil rights in several other illustrations from the period.

Ruby Bridges Hall now serves on the board of Norman Rockwell Museum and founded The Ruby Bridges Foundation in 1999 to promote the values of tolerance, respect, and appreciation of all differences. She commended Rockwell for having “enough courage to step up to the plate and say I’m going to make a statement, and he did it in a very powerful way.”

Special thanks to the Norman Rockwell Museum for providing the biographical information on the artist and this painting.

William Allman is the White House Curator

August 25, 2011
The Ups and Downs of Matchlessness

by Julia Sneden

“O matchless earth — we underrate the chance to dwell in thee!”
— Emily Dickinson

(a little love song)

Having grown up in northern California, that wondrous place of dry and temperate climate, I am finding it hard to adjust to the hot and sticky summer of the South. Mind you, I left California in 1965.

You might think that the ensuing 46 years would afford plenty of time in which to recalibrate my responses to extremes of temperature and humidity. I’m not usually so stubborn about things, but in this instance, I’ve never gotten a handle on my petulant inner child: She still insists on whining that it’s too hot, too moist, too oppressive do anything but complain.

Air conditioning is a wonderful thing and I’m grateful to the mind of man for inventing it, but I hate being house-bound all summer long, just to stay cool. There’s also the problem of brown-outs when too many hot people crank up their a/c, putting the electrical grid on overload. And given summer’s frequent thunderstorm activity in this part of the world, complete power outages are inevitable and fairly frequent.

When I was a kid living on the San Francisco Peninsula, we would hear an occasional, faint and far-off rumble from behind the mountains to the east. My mother would say: “You hear that? It’s thundering over in the Valley. But don’t worry; it never thunders here.” And she would tell us how frightened she was by her first thunderstorm. She had gone east to college, and during that nighttime storm, not only did the power go out, but a bolt of lightning hit a big tree just outside her dormitory window, shattering it on the spot. I hate to admit it, but her scaredy-cat gene lives on in me. I used to put on a brave front for my children, but they’re grown and gone, and these days I just flinch and squeak and don’t even pretend to be unaffected by the flash-and-boom weather.

When I was about 10, a family from back east moved into our neighborhood. They had a daughter my age who loved to complain that our beautiful live oak trees didn’t have big vines growing on them like the trees in the woods behind their house in Virginia. She said the vines were large enough for her to swing on like Tarzan: you just needed to check first to be sure they weren’t poison ivy vines. I, who was altogether too familiar with the misery occasioned by encounters with California’s virulent poison oak, shuddered to think of an actual vine of poison anything. Now that I’ve encountered real poison ivy, I have developed great respect for its unpleasant qualities, but I promise you that it can’t compare to the horror that is poison oak.

The same friend was sure that we were about to fall into the Pacific during an earthquake. I pointed out that there was a good ten mile stretch of mountains between us and the ocean, and although the San Andreas Fault ran about a mile from our house, it was down in the valley, and we lived on a high, rocky hill. No matter, she told me: somehow the ocean would well up and pour down over the mountains like a giant tidal wave. Or even if that didn’t happen, we were in danger of falling into the huge crack she envisioned running right through our hill when the next quake hit. Fortunately, she and her family moved back to Virginia after a year or two, and I breathed a lot easier.

August 24, 2011
The “most notorious liar in the country” Gets a Memorial on the Mall

by Jo Freeman

In all the celebrations going on this week, no one has noted the irony that Dr. King was often at odds with the federal government, as well as a lot of state governments. Only fifteen months after Dr. King’s famous speech at the August 28, 1963 march and rally, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told a group of women reporters that Dr. King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” This came in reaction to newspaper reports of a mild criticism by Dr. King of the FBI’s handling of civil rights complaints in the South.

Indeed it was that very march that convinced Hoover that Dr. King and the civil rights movement were serious threats to his America. He shifted the Bureau’s policy from observing the movement while providing information on it to local law enforcement in the South, into actively undermining it. Dr. King was his primary target. At Hoover’s direction, the FBI not only harassed Dr. King, but did not even warn him when it knew of threats on his life.

I was not at that now famous march 48 years ago; I was still a college student on the west coast. But that fall I was one of hundreds, thousands, of students to become active in the civil rights movement all over the country. After graduating from Berkeley in 1965 I went South to work for Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In my 18 months with SCLC I worked mostly in Alabama, but also in South Carolina, Mississippi, the Atlanta office and Chicago. After Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, I hitchhiked from Chicago to Atlanta because I needed to be present at his funeral.

While welcoming the memorialization of Dr. King at the seat of our national government, we should not forget that it and the civil rights movement had a very uneasy relationship. The movement’s goal was a fundamental change in our culture regarding race. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson agreed on the need for change, but it was not a priority. They were quite aware that most of the important Congressional committees were chaired by Southerners who could hold up their other proposals if they pushed the envelope on race.

Within the Department of Justice, movement demands created a contradictory response. Attorneys General Robert Kennedy, Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark were sympathetic. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was not. Technically, Hoover reported to the A.G. Realistically, he had his own empire. A.G.s came and went. Hoover had been in charge of the Bureau since 1924; by the 1960s forty percent of DoJ personnel reported to him and he had extensive files on all the politicians he worked for, with, and against.

Hoover worked very hard to keep his people loyal to him, diligent in pursuit of his goals, and distant from the rest of the DoJ. To further the cause of civil rights the A.G.s went around the FBI, using attorneys in the small Civil Rights Division to do much of the investigative work that should have been done by FBI agents.

August 23, 2011
Week of Activities Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.in DC; Updated Plans

by Jo Freeman

A week of celebration of Martin Luther King’s legacy began on August 22 with a press preview of the memorial to Dr. King on a four-acre site on the National Mall. It will end on August 28, the 48th anniversary of the famous March on Washington, when President Obama dedicates a memorial to the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He made his famous “I have a Dream” speech from the Lincoln Memorial at the end of that march in 1963.

The central theme of the monument was taken from a phrase in that speech: “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” Dr King’s image is carved into the stone of hope. To get to it one walks through a gap in a representation of the mountain of despair. It’s flanked on either side with a black granite wall in which are carved fourteen excerpts from Dr. King’s speeches that a committee found to be the most inspirational.

This memorial was sixteen years in the making. In 1996 Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing Alpha Phi Alpha — a national fraternity of black men — to erect a memorial. It raised $112 million dollars in private donations and hired the companies necessary to design and construct the monument. Ten million dollars in federal funding was provided under a resolution sponsored by Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. At the dedication the memorial will be turned over to the American people to be run and maintained by the National Park Service.

Although most of the people involved in this project were black, some criticism arose over the fact that the carving took place in China by Lei Yixin, a prominent Chinese sculptor. He brought his team of workers to DC assemble the parts of the monument and do the final detail work. The carving of Dr. King was based on a photo by Bob Fitch, who was SCLC’s photographer in the mid-1960s.

While many thought this disgruntlement had ended, the members of Local 1 of the Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers are still angry. They announced that they would picket the memorial all week to protest the fact that American workers were not used to erect it. However, they skipped the morning press conference where LeiYixin answered questions in Mandarin posed by some fifty reporters from roughly twenty countries.

Memorial events are going on all week. The National Memorial Project Foundation is holding luncheons and galas to raise still more money. The District government and the Martin Luther King Jr. library in DC have posted schedules of their activities so there will be plenty to do for the two to three hundred thousand visitors Foundation CEO Harry E, Johnson Sr, said would come to the celebration.

Note: On Saturday the National Prayer Service will be held at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. This will be the final official event of the Dedication week.

Dr. Johnson Sr.: “We have worked with the Park Service to ensure that the Memorial will be open to the public, weather permitting, on Saturday. The Memorial will be open Saturday from 7:00 a.m. to 12 noon.

“The official Dedication ceremony will be moved to a date yet determined in September or October. We will announce those details when we have them. For now, we wanted to make sure you had this information as soon as possible.”

©2011 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com

Jo Freeman is currently writing a book on her experiences in the Southern civil rights movement. Her experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area civil rights movement are related in her 2004 book, At Berkeley in the Sixties (Indiana U Press).

Image credit for scene from steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Aug. 28, 1963: US Government Photo

I Have a Dream Speech

August 23, 2011
Every Little Thing

by Doris O’Brien

A woman becomes a widow, a single person again, often after many long years. As frequently as this happens, anticipated or otherwise, the death of a spouse is a huge shock. And the unaccustomed loneliness that fills the aftermath is even worse.

I used to scoff at my widow friends who talked on and on about how wonderful their husbands were. Many of these worshippers of latter-day saints had been at constant odds with their spouses when they were alive. Often the couple seemed, in the twilight of their years, to have little in common beyond offspring and a physical desire to dine early and sleep late. Perhaps while their husbands were still alive, these women — in their heart of hearts — supposed they could have done a lot better, while grudgingly making the best of what they had.

Once widowed, however, they seem to be as lonely as a cowpoke under a darkling canopy of distant stars. It is a cruel adjustment. Whether the departed was exasperating, enigmatic or expendable, he is much missed. Even if conversations with him had long been reduced to shouting matches or barely audible grumbles, either one now seems preferable to the empty silence.

When my husband died some months ago, he temporarily made up for the void by leaving me with a house, garage and outdoor shed full of stuff with which he simply could not bear to part. He was a man of many interests, one of them being to hold on to just about everything he ever acquired. Perhaps that is why he kept me around so long! He was unashamedly an inveterate pack-rat of the highest (or lowest) order.

It has taken four humungous weekend garage sales (sometimes called “yard” or “estate” sales) to divest myself of most of his accumulation. Were he alive, he might be as amazed as I to re-discover those long-stashed belongings, though he certainly would have welcomed them as old friends. Yet why, for example, did he save a dozen cue sticks, when we haven’t owned a pool table since the ’70s? And what is the point of hoarding obsolete camping gear, when newer replacements are available at half the weight and twice the ingenuity? And did he really think he would “do ” something with all those stone cabochons he had created in a long-ago lapidary class?

But garage sales not only rake up the coals of memory, they provide unexpected amusement and involvement at a time when levity is solely needed. For years, for instance, I threatened to get rid of something my husband had bought during a motorhoming trip on his own to the north country. Throughout its entire life under our roof, this hideous object had a price tag of $95 dangling from it, though I doubt my thrifty spouse would have paid that much. Why he forked out anything at all for a large caribou foot made into a woman’s drawstring purse is a mystery. Obviously, it was never entrusted with my lipstick and wallet. At first, I tucked in its buckskin flap and used the gross foot for a wastepaper basket. Then for a doorstop. Finally, I hid it behind the door. At one point, I attempted unsuccessfully to pawn it off on a local antiques dealer.

So there it was, front and center, on a table in my first garage sale. And miraculously, when the garage door lifted, it was the first thing to go A guy spotted it immediately. “I love it!” he shouted across a phalanx of loaded tables. He also went on to buy a beat-up zebra skin rug, a highly shellacked mastodon (supposedly) bone, and an oosik. (If you don’t know what this is, try looking it up under “deviant art.” ) The buyer, in fact, was my husband incarnate.

But nobody ever really takes the place of a departed spouse. Even in the midst of the divestiture process, I had a hankering to tell him about some funny incident, to consult him as to how to price an item — and to wonder if he would ever have allowed me to sell anything at all!

Women who lost husbands years ago tell me that their memory, in time, becomes only a shadow. They recall them fondly … maybe too fondly. But that is how it should be — for the living and the dead.

©2011 Doris O’Brien for SeniorWomen.com

August 22, 2011
Five Ways Students Will Feel Budget Cuts

By Ben Wieder, Stateline Staff Writer

Steve McConnell / UC Berkeley

Budget cuts in California mean that UC Berkeley is enrolling more international and out-of-state students, who pay $23,000 more than in-state students. As students across the country go back to school, budget cuts are being felt in the classroom in a number of ways.

With billions of dollars cut from education budgets across the country, students are confronting some major changes as they return to school this year. Schools have been facing cuts for the past several years, but federal stimulus dollars softened the blow. Now, the federal money is dried up. Increasingly, school leaders at both the K-12 level as well as at public colleges and universities are unable to shield students from feeling the impact of budget cuts in the classrooms and in their daily lives. Here are five ways students will feel budget cuts this school year:

Squeezed in — and out — of classrooms

The most obvious thing many students will notice is that their class sizes are larger. According to a national survey of school superintendents by the American Association of School Administrators, more than 100,000 public school teachers have been laid off for the school year that is about to begin in some states and has already begun in others. In many school districts, having fewer teachers means packing more students into each classroom. High school students in Huntsville, Alabama, found classes packed with 40 to 50 students when they returned to school earlier this month, the Huntsville Times reports, after the state lost more than 1,000 teachers this year due to cuts.

Teacher staffing problems are creating other issues, as well. High schools in Manchester, New Hampshire, are eliminating some elective courses in the English department — cuts are still being finalized — and have had to turn some students away in the sciences, even from required classes. There’s a shortage of science teachers, partly as a result of budget cuts, and the state caps lab classes at 24 students, so cramming more students in the room is not an option. “Students may not get everything they asked for,” says district Superintendent Thomas Brennan.

The district’s three high schools will have to prioritize. They plan to focus first on making sure that juniors and seniors are able to fulfill requirements to graduate on time. Younger students might have to wait an extra semester or two to get into certain classes. The district is asking some teachers to take on additional classes and encouraging others to work toward certification in subjects where schools are short. “We’re trying to come up with any approach that we can to ensure that we have our core courses,” Brennan says.

Fewer majors to choose from

Incoming students at public colleges in states such as Missouri, Arizona and North Carolina might notice some changes to the course catalog this year. Dozens of majors were eliminated in those states, after legislators asked colleges to identify low-producing majors and programs, based on criteria such as enrollment and availability in other colleges in the state. In most cases, students who are already enrolled will be allowed to complete their major, but incoming students won’t be allowed to enroll in programs that have gotten the ax.

A wide variety of majors are on their way out. At North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a 14 percent budget cut last year led the administration to terminate French and Spanish majors. At Arizona State University, where the state has cut funding by $110 million over the past three years, students and faculty in the professional golf management program found out late last spring that their academic track would be eliminated.

August 22, 2011
Two Exhibits: Maya Zack and The Living Room; Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters by The Cone Sisters of Baltimore

Maya Zack: Living Room will be on view at The Jewish Museum until October 23, 2011. In this installation, artist and filmmaker Maya Zack takes a Jewish family’s apartment in 1930s Berlin as inspiration for this room-sized work, using 3D technology and sound to explore the past and how it is remembered. With four large-scale, computer-generated 3D prints, Zack shows cross-sections of the living room, dining room, kitchen and other spaces, including furniture, appliances, tableware, wallpaper and light fixtures. 3D glasses enhance these oversized (4’ high x 10’ wide) images and give them immediacy and depth. While much attention has been paid to the major world events of the era, Zack’s piece serves as a reminder that ordinary lives were interrupted by the catastrophic events of the Holocaust.

The installation is based on the remembrances of Manfred Nomburg, a German-born Jew now living in Israel, who fled Berlin in 1938 as a boy. His vivid memories of the Berlin apartment where he lived with his parents and brother before the war recall life in an average home, comfortable but not opulent, with furniture and housewares typical of the time and place. While looking at the images, visitors will hear a sound recording of Nomburg’s stories about his family’s home, adding texture and a sense of time to the installation. Recollections of the familiar objects and Nomburg’s anecdotes bring the rooms and their contents back to life.

Like Zack’s film Mother Economy, shown at The Jewish Museum in 2008, Living Room explores the intersection of personal memory with historical events. Zack is interested not only in the details the interviewee can recall but also in his memory gaps. Memory is by nature fragmented, and so is the scene before the viewer. Books lean against a wall without the underlying support of a shelf and traces of wallpaper reflect fractures of memory. Hurriedness and disarray are expressed by an overturned cup and a copy of the Jüdische Rundschau newspaper lying open on the floor, as if the family had just left the apartment in haste.

The artist was inspired by a trip to the home where her grandmother grew up in Slovakia. Zack recalls her “encounter with the actual house, and the sense of emptiness and absence [she] felt while trying to imagine what had happened in between its walls — reconstructing a reality from a borrowed memory.”

Maya Zack was born in Israel in 1976 and presently lives and works in Tel Aviv. She has had solo exhibitions at the Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv, the Natalie Seroussi Gallery in Paris, the Bezalel Gallery in Jerusalem and the CUC Gallery in Berlin, among others. Her work has been included in group shows in Berlin, Munich, Milan, New York, and other cities.

Zack’s work is in many museum collections including the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Beit Hatfutsot Museum in Tel Aviv. Her films have been screened at festivals in Los Angeles, Vienna, Paris, Cologne, Budapest, Haifa, Tel Aviv and New York. In 2008, Maya Zack was awarded Germany’s Celeste Art Prize for Mother Economy.

Also appearing at the Jewish Museum is the exhibit, Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore:

Henri Matisse called them “my two Baltimore ladies.” Their friend Gertrude Stein wrote a poem about them entitled Two Women. The sisters Dr. Claribel Cone (1864-1929) and Miss Etta Cone (1870-1949) began buying art directly out of the Parisian studios of avant-garde artists in 1905. Although their taste for this radical art was little understood — critics disparaged Matisse at the time and Pablo Picasso was virtually unknown — the Cones followed their passions and eventually amassed one of the world’s greatest art collections.

The Jewish Museum is presenting Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore, an exhibition of over 50 works from The Baltimore Museum of Art’s internationally renowned Cone Collection until September 25, 2011.

August 19, 2011
Women and Communities of Color Could Suffer from the Super Committee 12’s Lack of Diversity

Note: This article was first published by Science Progress

By Julie Ajinkya |

Those of us who waited with baited breath to see which members of Congress would be appointed to the supercommittee of 12 to find $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years are likely unsurprised at the lack of diversity on the bipartisan congressional committee. While Republicans failed to appoint a single female member or member of color, at least the Democrats selected Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-SC), and Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA).

Our country is 51 percent female, 13 percent African American, and 16 percent Hispanic, so it is extremely disheartening that Sen. Murray will be the only woman on the panel while Rep. Clyburn is its only African American member and Rep. Becerra is its only Latino member (there are no Asian Pacific Islander or Native American members).

We know that committee members will make important choices between spending cuts and tax breaks. Women and communities of color are both populations that rely disproportionately on safety net programs, but women of color constitute the most vulnerable population that relies on these services in this economic climate. This group currently lacks even a single representative member on the committee.

But this disappointment with the breakdown of the committee goes beyond simple dissatisfaction with parity in representation — it is concern over the great disconnect between members of this extraordinarily powerful committee and the communities that will disproportionately suffer from further cuts.

The committee’s lack of diversity reflects Congress’s current composition

The lack of diversity on the joint committee is not surprising precisely because of the lack of diversity in Congress overall. Women hold only 17 percent of congressional seats, with 75 seats in the House and 17 seats in the Senate (ranking the United States 90th in the world in terms of gender parity in national legislatures). African Americans comprise only 8 percent of the total membership with 44 seats in the House, yet they no longer enjoy a single seat in the Senate after its only African American member, Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL), retired last year. Hispanics only make up 6 percent of the total membership, with 29 seats in the House and 2 seats in the Senate. Asian Pacific Islander members make up 3 percent, with 11 seats in the House and 2 seats in the Senate, and there is a sole Native American member in the House.

Some critics of parity in representation argue that we should focus more on experience than gender, racial, or ethnic characteristics. What is worrying about the lack of diversity on this committee, however, is precisely the lack of experience—specifically the majority of members’ lack of familiarity with the critical role that many programs play in the lives of low-income communities. This bipartisan committee has been granted the extraordinary powers of coming up with an additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions, and we know that its members are going to be considering further cuts to discretionary spending as well as cuts to entitlement programs and revenue increases.

It seems particularly unrepresentative for some of the wealthiest members of Congress to hold the fate of low-income communities in their hands. It should surprise no one that all but one of the six Republican members of this committee rank in the top half of the House or Senate in their net worth. In contrast, all but one of the six Democrats rank near or in the bottom half of the House or Senate in their net worth, according to annual tables kept by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Consider that information side by side with a recent Pew study on racial wealth gaps that reveals that national wealth disparities are currently the largest they have ever been since the government started publishing this data 25 years ago. The median wealth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than Hispanic households.

August 18, 2011
Are You Considering Retirement? Just What Is The Average Retirement Age?

By Alicia H. Munnell*

Introduction

Since working longer is the key to a secure retirement for the vast majority of older Americans, it is useful to take a look at labor force trends for those under and over age 65 for the last century.

This brief proceeds in three steps. The first section describes the long-run decline in labor force participation of men. The second looks at the turnaround that began in the mid-1980s. The third section discusses the trends for women, which combine their increasing labor force activity, on the one hand, and incentives to retire, on the other.

The final section concludes that labor force activity of both men and women has increased significantly since the mid-1980s as many incentives now encourage work. Several hurdles remain to continued increases, however, including the sluggish economic recovery, the move away from career employment, the availability of Social Security at 62, and employer resistance to part-time employment.

The Long-term Decline in Employment Rates

The notion of retirement as a distinct and extended stage of life is a recent innovation. Up to the end of the 19th century, people generally worked as long as they could. In their prime, they put in 60 hours of work each week. And, at the end of their lives, they had only about two years of ‘retirement,’ often due to ill health.

Beginning around 1880, the percentage of the older male population at work began to decline sharply. Experts attribute this decline to an unexpected and substantial stream of income that appeared in the form of old-age pensions for Civil War veterans. A comprehensive study found that veterans eligible for these pensions had significantly higher retirement rates than the population at large.

As the veterans died off, work rates did not return to their previous levels. Various analysts argue that this trend reflects the growth of workers’ incomes. But employer attitudes were also becoming important. The US workforce was rapidly shifting from self-employment, most notably in agriculture, to employees of large enterprises. Employers increasingly introduced mandatory retirement ages for their employees. And they were reluctant to hire older workers, especially during the Great Depression.

The next big decline in the work rates of older men occurred after World War II. One obvious factor was the availability of Social Security benefits. The legislation was enacted in 1935; Old Age welfare benefits were paid almost immediately and Social Security retirement benefits began in 1940. The postwar period also saw the expansion of employer pensions, as union power grew and corporations increasingly saw pensions as a crucial component of their personnel systems.

The introduction of Medicare in 1965 and the sharp increase in Social Security benefits in 1972 probably led to the final leg of the decline in workforce activity of older men. And, because benefits were available at 62, Social Security may also explain part of the decline in workforce activity for men 55-64.

The Recent Reversal

The downward trajectory stopped around the mid-1980s, and since then the labor force participation of men both 55-64 and 65 and over has gradually increased. Many factors help explain this turnaround.

August 18, 2011
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

by Rose Madeline Mula

I can’t believe that it’s been twenty-five years since my mother went to that big senior center in the sky. I often think that if she were to come back today, she’d be very perplexed. So much has changed in the last quarter-century.

Say she were to cook dinner (an activity which has almost completely been supplanted by fast-food restaurants and take-out). If she looked for an apron, which she always wore when cooking, good luck to her.

Aprons have disappeared, along with the once-ubiquitous cotton housedress. Jeans are now the uniform of the day for everyone, regardless of gender, age or girth — or activity, for that matter — from cleaning out the garage to sipping Cosmos at the Ritz, whatever a Cosmo is. Mom would have no idea.

If instead of her usual ginger ale, she decided to have a cocktail, she would have ordered a Pink Lady or an old fashioned and would have been surprised that the bartender had never heard of either. Whatever she drank, she would never wear jeans to a cocktail lounge. However, to get into her favorite dressy frock, she’d really need a girdle; but they no longer exist. Well, they do; but she’d never find one because she wouldn’t know that she should ask for Spanx or “shapewear.”

Nor would Mom be pleased if she went shopping for other undergarments. What’s with those indecent thong thingies, she’d wonder? Whatever happened to panties? For that matter, whatever happened to skirts that reached the knees and didn’t fit like a second skin? Today women are constantly playing tug of war with their crotch-length hems, especially when they try to sit down. And don’t they realize that the tight band aids that pass for skirts these days make their rear ends look huge? Mom would remember the boned corsets she used to wear to make hers as flat as possible. And she would certainly be flabbergasted at all the bosoms of all ages in public view. Don’t decency laws ban those?

But her shock at the bevy of bouncing boobies would pale in comparison to her reaction to today’s movies or TV. Can those couples (and even threesomes!) actually be doing that?! In front of cameras?!

August 16, 2011