IGY
A wistful song entitled “I.G.Y”,[1] by singer-songwriter Donald Fagen got a lot of airplay on radio stations in my area in the mid 1980’s. The song’s title is an abbreviation for “International Geophysical Year,” a span of 17 months in 1957 and 1958 when scientists and their institutions collaborated across national boundaries, based on earlier “International Polar Years,” efforts to collaborate internationally on scientific research at the Earth’s poles. Using a pop music verse-chorus form and the tonal rules of jazz music adapted to it, “I.G.Y.” depicts the optimism of scientists during the late 1950s. Much of the lyric of the song centers around an enumeration of modern infrastructure projects, leisure opportunities, and consumer products, such as fast trains to Europe, spandex, and satellite casinos in space, all things which were either available or considered to be shortly available to “artists everywhere.” In its description of that near future, the song’s chorus sings with that optimism: “What a beautiful world this will be! / What a glorious time to be free!” And in doing so, successfully captured the imagination and appeal of American consumer culture near the end of the postwar period after World War II. Fagen might just as well have been writing about the 1920s as the 1950s; similar trends were active during both postwar periods, which, when seen in broad strokes, resembled each other more than the surface differences commonly drawn between the two eras.
It is fair to call either time an age of affluence. Very large companies keen to grow internationally exploited a postwar climate where the United States was really the only Great Power or Superpower with any significant economic might. Americans eager to be free of the rationing and other depravations of a total national war war footing desired a return to “normalcy,” as Warren Harding put it during his 1920 candidacy: a time when they could work for themselves and their own prosperity after having secured for their country a measure of safety from imperialism or fascism. Domestically, they elected Harding, and in the 50’s they “liked Ike”, and worked in those large companies applied their ingenuity and energy to consumer products, and in both time periods the economy experienced a sharp postwar money shock before recovering for a period of sustained growth.
The leaders of those companies worked with government to grow their businesses worldwide, at times wielding the military power of the United States to open or maintain trade routes. In the first postwar period the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the occupations of Caribbean and Philippine islands, the Panama Canal, and parts of Mexico, all served to clear the way for American-branded trade. Most of those areas remained under American hegemony during the second postwar period, either through direct occupation, as in Guam or Puerto Rico, or through basing agreements which persisted after Philippine and Cuban independence, and in places like occupied Germany or South Korea. And after World War II, the United States led the United Nations in “peacekeeping” policy, reified a stance of “containment” toward Soviet expansion, and helped rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan, as it did with commercial and investment banking arrangements in the 1920’s to help Europe pay war reparations and recover from the first World War. Among other effects, this in turn opened markets for American companies and directly or indirectly created millions of jobs for its people. At their height, both postwar cultures looked forward, through commerce, for the “streamlined world” from Fagen’s song, with “perfect weather” in which the people would be “eternally free, yes, and eternally young.”
But Fagen started by singing, “Standing tough under stars and stripes,” an attitude any Cold Warrior would instantly recognize. The idea of uniting under the American flag is not unique to any particular decade of American history, but during the two postwar periods, it took a form that receives almost nothing but hindsight criticism, if it’s examined at all. While lacking a real wartime enemy, some politicians felt to invent or exaggerate real threats into unreal panics. The 1920s had A. Mitchell Palmer, the 50s had Senator Joseph McCarthy. Both regarded Socialism and Communism as imminent threats to American culture. Each overstated his case: Palmer’s Red Scare “predicted that on May Day 1920 an unnamed radical conspiracy would attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government,” (700) a warning that turned out to be meritless. McCarthy’s Great Fear swept up Hollywood and other media producers grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He claimed to know the names of “57… card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.” (817) As with Palmer, McCarthy escalated his accusations until he overreached, when he disingenuously accused the Army of disloyalty on a television broadcast of his hearings.
That Americans in peacetime would direct suspicion at Socialist and Communist ideas after wartime is not surprising. Communist ideas may have originally come from German philosophers like Marx and Engels, but the people bringing them to American shores were immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe for whom socialist ideas had the greatest appeal, in part because they had become an underclass in American cities rivaled in size only by the almost permanently segregated African American minority. “Senator William Bruce of Maryland branded them ‘indigestible lumps’ in the ‘national stomach,’ implying that they might never be absorbed into the dominant culture.” (718) These groups tended to organize into labor unions which utilized socialist ideas within their organizations, and called for the kinds of social reform which they hoped could set them on equal footing with established, more privileged Whites in the nation. These were people whose experience was a little outside the depiction in “I.G.Y.,” but as they repudiated Communism, their place in America became more assured.
In short, they integrated themselves. The unions were in the way of the ambitions of corporate oligarchs unwilling to submit quietly to a labor union’s demands, who in both eras chose instead to try and obviate them. Collective bargaining, especially if it meant dealing with the ascendency of Socialists, Communists, or agitators for greater racial equality, went against the sense of the populace and restrained what the CIO, IWW, or AFL could claim. And in a way, the need for labor unions abated somewhat during both periods, as the country drew back from wartime employment levels and rising prosperity permitted companies the resources they needed to negotiate with individuals in good faith, implementing what has come to be known as “welfare capitalism.” Neither era saw the elimination of labor unions whose ranks and influence swelled in wartime, but the promises of pensions and healthcare for vital employees often kept unions from getting a foothold in a company in the first place. Instead, where unions survived, companies negotiated accords which balanced their interests, a tension that still exists today where labor or trade unions exist.
The cases Palmer and McCarthy had made against Communist radicalism were not entirely without merit in either time period. Although their approaches to fighting it poisoned their efforts and eventually turned the tide of public opinion against total support for all they did, each postwar era still contained nativist cultural elements more modern Americans are apparently proud to reject, at least insofar as such impulses today have been redirected to groupings of political party membership, national origin, or level of education, instead of race. In the 1920’s the Ku Klux Klan, known then and now for its white supremacist stances, resurged in popularity and operated in the open, capturing state and local governments around the country, and in conspiracy also combined to suppress Black activism through raw, violent intimidation, in the North as well as the South. In the 1950s, segregated racism, especially for African Americans, imposed a superficially genteel kind of oppression which denied Blacks any opportunities to lay hold on very much of the new prosperity at all, disingenuously claiming segregated equality without actual equality.
In the South, these minority groups suffered oppression under Jim Crow laws and the remnants of prewar Klan activity, including secretive lynchings. In places where they migrated in the North and West, they were denied entrance into circles of prosperity by real estate covenants attached to the sale of homes in the new suburbs, and in the 1920s, by Klan threats. No non-Whites could live in any Levittown. People like Malcolm X or Rosa Parks, whose families suffered oppression throughout both postwar periods and the times of turmoil after and between them, could never have had a wistful reaction to the lyrics of “I.G.Y.” Instead their activism was focused on a “beautiful world” of social and economic parity or equity, not perfection through consumer products and leisure, and throughout both eras the tides of nativism and willful ignorance of the disparity combined to keep them down. A full national conversation about race relations would not come until the 1960s. Malcolm X decried this condition, and Parks permitted her own persecution on a bus in order to start that conversation.
“I.G.Y.” omits from its lines those depravations. In his album liner for “The Nightfly”, where “I.G.Y.” is the first track, Fagen wrote, “The songs on this album represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build.” Such a young man would have had a life like like that of my own parents from Salt Lake City or southern Idaho, where no minorities were in their neighborhoods at all. Even as late as 1981, when rumors flew around my Vancouver, Washington suburban neighborhood that a “colored teacher” had been hired by the school, I and my sixth grade friends wondered to each other why and whether that had any significance, even though it had never happened there before then.
That 1981 date itself is telling: Fagen recorded the song that year, during what is known now as the second-worst economic drawback since the Great Depression, a sharp contraction caused by very high interest rates. By that time the country had changed, singing of a near-future time when “fellows with compassion and vision” would program the perfect future drips with irony and not a little bit of nostalgia for what might have been, had Americans noticed: All ages of affluence in America have ended. “I.G.Y.,” lives on today as enjoyable and perfectly recorded studio pop music, but is also useful as a way to showcase the things Americans always see and, by omission, miss, when times are very good.
Notes
[1] I.G.Y — by Donald Fagen
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from new york to paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be a.o.k.
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from new york to paris
(more leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Works Cited
Page numbers inserted refer to Henretta, James A., David Brody, and Lynn Dumeinil, America’s History, Volume Two: Since 1865. Sixth Edition, Boston, New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008.
“I.G.Y. Lyrics – Steely Dan.” Lyrics, Song Lyrics – LyricsFreak.com. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/steely+dan/igy_20469426.html (accessed October 7, 2012).
“The Nightfly.” The Nightfly. http://aln2.albumlinernotes.com/The_Nightfly.html (accessed October 7, 2012).
