THOMAS WOLFE, THE ME DECADE AND THE THIRD GREAT AWAKENING:

The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that are so big and so obvious (like the Big Dipper) no one ever comments on them any more. Namely: the thirty-year boom. Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940's touched off a boom that has continued for more than thirty years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums. Nevertheless, in the city of Compton, California, it is possible for a family of four at the very lowest class level, which is known in America today as "on welfare," to draw an income of $8,000 a year entirely from public sources. This is more than most British newspaper columnists and Italian factory foremen make, even allowing for differences in living costs. . . .

I can remember what brave plans visionary architects at Yale and Harvard still had for the common man in the early 1950's. (They actually used the term "the common man.") They had brought the utopian socialist dream forward into the twentieth century. They had things figured out for the workingman down to truly minute details, such as lamp switches. . . . Worker Housing in America would have pure beige rooms, stripped, freed, purged of all moldings, cornices, and overhangs . . . . Worker Housing would be liberated from all wallpaper, "drapes," Wilton rugs with flowers on them, lamps with fringed shades and bases that looked like vases or Greek columns. It would be cleansed of all doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, and radiator covers. . . .

But somehow the workers, incurable slobs that they were, avoided Worker Housing, better known as "the projects," as if it had a smell. They were heading out instead to the suburbs the suburbs!--to places like Islip, Long Island, and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles--and buying houses with clapboard siding and pitched roofs and shingles and gaslight-style front porch lamps and mailboxes set up on top of lengths of stiffened chain that seemed to defy gravity, and all sorts of other unbelievably cute or antiquey touches, and they loaded these houses with "drapes" such as baffled all description and wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in, and they put barbecue pits and fish ponds with concrete cherubs urinating into them on the lawn out back, and they parked twenty-five-foot-long cars out front and Evinrude cruisers up on tow trailers in the carport just beyond the breezeway. . . .

De Tocqueville's idea of modern man lost "in the solitude of his own heart" has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism packed together in cities with people he doesn't know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts--in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave of the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920's. . .

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940's, they did an astonishing thing they took their money and ran! They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do--they discovered and started doting on Me! They've created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business!

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