Nostalgia for the 30-Year ‘Century of the Common Man’

Abstract

Jack Metzgar grew up in a steelworking family during the best 30 years in U.S. history for common people, what the French call the Glorious 30 (trente glorieuses) from 1945 to 1975. It was a time of extraordinary economic prosperity that was widely shared. Average real incomes rose faster than ever before or since, with the bottom income quintiles advancing faster and stronger than the middle or top. This unprecedented shared prosperity did not lead to complacency and mindlessconsumerism, as was feared at the time, but rather to a golden age of collective action and a string of liberatory movements beginning with the black civil rights struggle and followed by the beginnings of the women’s and gay liberation movements, among many others. The following is an excerpt from an auto-ethnography Jack is writing about his experience of working-class and professional middle-class cultures from those times to today.