That sense of powerlessness would only be strengthened by the killing sprees that have become more frequent over the years. Since Charles Whitman shot 14 students at the University of Texas at Austin 46 years ago, 22 other Americans have opened fire on strangers in restaurants, schools, and, most recently, a movie theater. From 1990 to 2000, there were four of these shooting sprees. There have been six in the past two years.

When viewed alongside the current wave of political hostilities and mistrust in the country, some Americans have been tempted into seeing an imminent collapse of society. Sooner or later, the thinking goes, this streak of violence in American society will push the country to some disastrous end.

For perspective’s sake, we thought we’d offer some reflection on this subject from someone who lived in a truly violent and troubled year. In a Post article of 1968, Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked, “Has This Country Gone Mad?”

When Moynihan wrote this article, he was listed as merely a former Assistant Secretary of Labor. Later, he served four terms as New York

“Violence has rarely been altogether absent from American life… But I think the violence of this age is different: It is greater, more real, more personal, suffused throughout the society, associated with not one but a dozen issues and causes.

“The rise of black violence has been an… ominous and irrational turn… White terrorism against Negroes is an old and hideous aspect of American life, but… now it seems to be becoming a pastime for suburban housewives, taking target practice before television cameras, filling black silhouettes with white holes.

“Protest against war has been an old and honorable tradition in America, but with this war [in Vietnam] the peace movement itself has turned violent, threatening elected officials…

“One group after another appears to be withdrawing its consent from the agreements that have made us one of the most stable democracies in the history of the world.

“The espousal of violence, and violence itself, mount on every hand: private crime, organized crime; civil disorder at home to the point of insurrection, violence abroad on a scale unimagined.”

Students occupy an administration building at Columbia University, 1968.

Keep in mind what was taking place as Moynihan was writing. In 1968, black militant activists were promoting violent resistance to white society. Black Panthers and policemen were trading shots in Oakland, Calif. The war in Vietnam was expanding: the Tet Offensive had brought enemy troops to the gates of the American Embassy in Saigon, and the U.S. began moving troops into Laos. Anti-war protestors became more militant; students took over Columbia University and rioted outside the Democratic convention. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent riots were barely a month in the past. Just a few months later, Robert Kennedy would be assassinated while campaigning for the presidency.

In 2012, as the media reports (and sometimes promotes) messages of bitter social division, the separation between conservatives and liberals seem wider than ever before. But for all the bluster and threats, it still isn’t as great as in 1968. Back then, reactionaries and radicals were trying to overturn society, while a great number of Americans seemed willing to watch the collapse.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Killed on April 4, 1968.

“A good many Americans do not hesitate to conclude from all this that American society is doomed, and they make no effort to conceal their great pleasure at this prospect. The ‘lust for apocalypse’… is something formidable to behold, especially in… the Ivy League radicals… [Meanwhile] Gov. George Wallace of Alabama… will have millions of Americans voting for him for President next fall… In East Harlem, a school official advises black children to get themselves guns and to practice using them. On silhouettes of suburban housewives, perhaps.

“Increasingly the nation exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown. Is there anything to be done?”

Not a great deal, Moynihan answered, but a good beginning would be to abandon the myths that we could either control events or we were helpless. It would help, he said, if we “try to understand our collective strength as a people, and to try to see what is happening to that strength.

“The great power of the American nation…lies in our capacity to govern ourselves.

“Of the 123 members of the United Nations, there are fewer than a dozen that existed in 1914 and have not had their form of government changed by force since that time. We are one of those very fortunate few. More than luck is involved.”

Robert F. Kennedy. Killed June 6, 1968.

What separated us from them was “the ability to live with one another.” America had been so brilliantly successful at this that we no longer appreciated it. It was time to remember what an accomplishment creative harmony was.

“An Englishman, an expert on guerrilla warfare, put it concisely to a Washington friend about a year ago. The visitor was asked why American efforts to impart the rudiments of orderly government seemed to have so little success in underdeveloped countries. ‘Elemental,’ came the reply, ‘You teach them all your techniques, give them all the machinery and manuals of operation… The more you do it, the more they become convinced and bitterly resentful…  as they see it… you are deliberately withholding from them the one all-important secret that you have and they do not, and that is the knowledge of how to trust one another.”

This ability to trust, he continued, would not survive all the reckless talk about dissolution and despair. We shouldn’t come to accept civil hostilities and divisions as the natural state of America. “There must be a stop to this trend toward violence, and in particular, an immediate and passionate objection to any voice that gives aid and comfort to the present drift of events. That is almost a violent statement itself, but one surely warranted in the present state of the American republic.”

A Voice From a Truly Violent Year The Saturday Evening Post

Some time ago, Yitz Twersky of New York found a page torn from a magazine showing his mother-in-law, Ernestine, two years old at the time, with her parents at Ellis Island. While this was exciting, there was no information which magazine it appeared in.

However, Twersky noticed tiny print alongside the picture that identified the photographer: Ollie Atkins. As Mr. Twersky soon discovered, Ollie Atkins was a big name in photography — a renowned photojournalist who took award-winning photos of history makers like Truman; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Richard Nixon and others. In fact, Atkins served for several years as the White House photographer.

The search for Ollie Atkins led to a repository of the photographers’ work at George Mason University. Fortunately, Atkins was a meticulous record-keeper, who kept exhaustive lists of his work. The curators at the Atkins collection identified Mr. Twersky’s photo as one that accompanied a 1949 article in The Saturday Evening Post, entitled “They Do Anything to Get Into the U.S.A.”

Twersky was over the moon. The archivist could practically hear him leaping for joy over the phone. How did his mother-in-law react? “She was crying,” Twersky told us. “I went online and found an old copy of January 29, 1949, Saturday Evening Post so she would have the original issue.”

The manifest for the ship that took Rabbi Kresch and his family to America. He was number 16 on the list.
Courtesy of Yitz Twersky

Mr. Twersky even e-mailed us a copy of the ship’s manifest from 1948 that his in-laws had kept all these years, showing Rabbi Feiwel Kresch as number sixteen on the list, with his wife Mala and tiny Ernestine (our reader’s future mother-in-law) listed below him. “This is the document that’s in front of the official in the photo,” Mr. Twersky informed us.

Little Ernestine’s parents had escaped Nazi-run Poland, eventually surviving an arduous journey to France. The Post article, (link below) shares many stories, humorous to pitiable, about what immigrants would do to beat the quotas and gain admittance to American soil. But Mr. Twersky’s tale gave us a new slant as to why people were so desperate. As tragic as WWII Europe was, the post-war years were brutally bleak as well. The U.S. was still determined to keep out “undesirables,” and post-war Europe was hoping to avert the next war by insisted displaced people return to their homeland, no matter how unhealthy that would be for them.

The few who managed to reach America found that the quota set for their country had already been filled. Men of the cloth were among the exceptions to the quotas, so Rabbi Kresch and his family were duly admitted. Below is a photo of Ernestine today, a pretty lady with her own grandchildren.

Yitz Twersky's mother-in-law, Ernestine, today. She was two years old when she appeared in the Post.
Photo courtesy of Yitz Twersky

The 1949 article was by James McFarland, an American visa official who had the often unenviable task of permitting or denying admittance to the U.S. “I have nursed my aching ears against a babel of foreign tongues, have intervened in fist fights and pacified drunks,” he wrote of his job. “I have joggled wailing babies on my knee, have fended off bribes and turned a chill eye to the lures of female charmers.” He concluded that “on occasion I have been shocked and disillusioned. But I have also been genuinely touched and inspired by the sincerity and resoluteness of purpose of a host of Europeans, Asiatics, Latin Americans and our good neighbors to the north, the Canadians, who want to become American citizens.”

With immigration a hot issue today, it is worthwhile to read how generations of immigrants have always struggled to enter America.

We thank Yitz Twersky and family for sharing their tale and giving us the opportunity to help them fill a gap in their family’s chronicle.

  Read “They Do Anything to Get Into the USA,” by James McFarland. Published January 29, 1949.

I Know the Girl in That Photo! The Saturday Evening Post