Well, judging from what people were telling the Post, it felt a lot like today.

Life in 1962. Click image to enlarge.

“We don’t have the family as a unit as we used to have. As a result, a lot of the kids have got out of control.”

“People seem to have lost something. They don’t seem to care anymore. Maybe what we’ve lost is Americanism. They don’t teach it to the kids anymore.”

“These teenagers that really scare you, with their gangs … and all. What’s got into our kids? I don’t know.”

“We’re all living too fast. … We’re all running and we can’t catch up.”

“We’re becoming decadent. … Moral values have declined. People don’t feel patriotism as they used to.

These quotes were typical of the responses from the 500 people interviewed by Stewart Alsop for his article, “The Mood of America.”  Our country was in a “curious national mood” that year, according to Stewart Alsop. After talking to Americans in seven states, he concluded that the country’s odd mood was “balky, ambivalent, and contradictory.”

 “For example, the American people, to judge from their talk, are in an essentially conservative frame of mind. The word ‘socialism’ to most of them is almost as bad a word as ‘communism.’ They are worried about Government spending, and instinctively resistant to what they call ‘too much government.’ A surprising number of them are firmly opposed to any tax cut unless it is accompanied by a balanced budget.

“In view of all this, one might suppose that there was a great tide of public sentiment in favor of the … more conservative Republican party. [Yet] most voters prefer the Democratic Party, and they prefer President Kennedy to any now-visible Republican rival by a big majority. And except in the Middle West, most voters like the President’s Medicare program, which is anathema to conservatives.

“There are other odd ambivalences. For example, most of the people we talked to fear nuclear war more than anything else, but only one in five thinks there is much danger of such a war.

“Finally, the American people are by and large a strongly moral, even moralistic people, who are deeply worried about … the morality of the American people.”

Conducting his cross-country study of Americans' attitudes, reporter Alsop interviewed Mrs. Barbara Diamond on a northside Chicago street.

It seems strange now that Alsop expected more consistency among American voters. It was understandable, though; the country was entering an age of changes and challenges. In February of that year, America had taken another giant step into space with John Glenn’s orbit of the earth. In October it would confront Russian missiles pointed at us from Cuba. Ready or not, the country would have to consider how it would respond to the changes of the modern world.

Many responded with divided loyalties between the old and the new. The division had already begun to show in the change of presidents. While America had always revered and identified with Dwight Eisenhower, they were increasingly drawn to the more aloof, intellectual, charismatic Kennedy. They were still soundly against ‘big government’ but they were growing more supportive of the struggling NASA program and Medicare.

The ambivalence between the old and new loyalties was particularly noticeable on the question of racial equality. The basic view of White Americans, according to Alsop, was summed by a Baltimore housewife who said, “They got rights, just like anybody else. They ought to vote and have just as good schools and all that, but I don’t see why we got to mingle together.” Many could accept the new thinking about equal rights; they just couldn’t yet accept Black Americans.

President Kennedy stirred excitement wherever he went, as shown by the swarming greeting he received in Malibu, California.

It was a time of great challenge, not unlike today. And, like today, the uneasiness and uncertainty over the way forward lead some Americans to believe we have lost our moral compass. The economy had stalled, and some feared a recession was on its way. The Cold War was close to going ‘hot,’ and we were regularly conducting air-raid drills against the possibility of a nuclear attack. Yet, Alsop was “really surprised [by] the number of people who felt [our] greatest problems are moral rather than economic or political. … A surprising number seem to feel that somehow, somewhere, America has lost something—a sense of purpose, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of home and family … something that was good that has gone out of American life.”

If he was interviewing Americans today, Alsop would probably get the same sense of concern about our moral condition and the feeling of loss. He might feel the same atmosphere of “part nostalgia, part moral indignation.”

But would he find the character of the American people the same as he did in 1962: “a pleasant people, unsuspicious and openhearted”?

Living the 1962 Life The Saturday Evening Post

Rockwell spent six months painting The Four Freedoms, which were published in a series of Saturday Evening Post issues in 1943, accompanied by short essays from four distinguished writers. The U.S. Government subsequently issued posters of Rockwell’s paintings in a highly successful war bond campaign that raised more than $132 million for the war effort. Rockwell’s homey depictions of Roosevelt’s abstract concepts were widely popular across America, yet not everyone was completely in tune with the ideas elaborated in Roosevelt’s speech.

In an editorial published later in 1943 (reprinted below), Post editors addressed a controversy over the meaning of the freedoms, in a debate that still has relevance today. Perhaps not since FDR has a president faced challenges as daunting as those that await our new Commander in Chief, who like FDR promised significant “change” in a time of tremendous economic and global turmoil.

“It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun,” Barack Obama said during the campaign. “Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”

Is the dream still alive? As then, we are certainly permitted to hope and aspire to the same ideal.
The Four Freedoms Are an Ideal

For millions of people throughout the world the Four Freedoms have come to represent something which gives meaning and importance to the sacrifices which the human race is now making, but these freedoms are by no means universally accepted as worthy aims for nations at war. Indeed, a not inconsiderable number of people regard the Four Freedoms as actually evil, an effort to deceive people into imagining that they will never again have to take thought for the morrow, since government will provide everything for them.

Few people object to the first two freedoms mentioned by President Roosevelt in his message of January 6, 1941. Freedoms of Speech and Religion are familiar to Americans and are already guaranteed to them. Some people wondered whether the President’s phrase “everywhere in the world” meant that the United States would be called on to fight until such liberties as we enjoy became the right of millions in Asia, Russia, and Eastern Europe. But what the President said was that we “look forward to a world” in which these freedoms are taken for granted. In as much as we Americans have prided ourselves on looking forward to such a free world ever since we became free ourselves, it is difficult to see that Mr. Roosevelt said anything very alarming when he led the world to hope that Freedoms of Speech and Religion might someday be the possession of men everywhere.

The real controversy, of course, rages about the other two freedoms: Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The assumption by those who are alarmed at their inclusion in a body of doctrine is that they imply that men are to be guaranteed not merely against “want” in the literal sense, but against lacking anything they happen to desire at any given moment. Freedom from Fear, these critics affect to believe, implies that the Government is fraudulently promising to remove all the hazards of life which men have feared in the past.

If we believed that either Freedom from Want or Freedom from Fear meant that the New Deal was promising to pass a miracle which would end the necessity of individual work or foresight, reward the lazy and incompetent as richly as the able and conscientious, and set up a “welfare state,” we should be as dubious about the Four Freedoms as are some of our correspondents. Some New Dealers may misconstrue these freedoms, but there is little ground for such an interpretation. After all, “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants” are as nearly realizable as “the full dinner pail” or “a chicken in every pot”— phrases seldom associated with radical welfare schemes. In fact, such understandings have been the professed goal of American statesmen for many years.

As to Freedom from Fear, it seems to us to contain no meaning more revolutionary than that suggested by Norman Rockwell’s touching artistic interpretation, in the picture of the parents regarding the untroubled sleep of their children. Mr. Roosevelt expressed Freedom from Fear as translatable into “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point…that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.” Nothing about guarantees against fear of measles, graying hair or the consequences of laziness or incompetence.

If there is genuine confusion about the meaning of the Four Freedoms, some of it is doubtless explained by failure to note that Mr. Roosevelt, in listing these objectives, used the expression, “we look forward to a world.” Well, so do the rest of us look forward to a world in which men shall respect the right of others to their own opinions; a world in which better use shall be made of the machinery of production, so that lack of necessities which are so easily produced shall be the lot of nobody who can and will contribute his labor; a world organized politically, so that men need not fear the horrors of destruction by weapons of war.

Few of us expect such a world to be attained all at once, by fiat of the executive or by mere use of phrases. But all of us are permitted to hope, in the midst of an unprecedently cruel and destructive war, that the peoples of the world will eventually understand their problems sufficiently to solve some of them. Thus interpreted, the Four Freedoms represent pretty well what men have always hoped for—political liberty, a better standard of living and an end to war. We should think all Americans could get together on such an expression of human aspiration.

Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms The Saturday Evening Post

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11. TRANQUILITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

In this piece it was my design to have endeavored to convince young persons that no qualities were so likely to make a poor man’s fortune as those of probity and integrity. My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list.

Benjamin Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues The Saturday Evening Post