November 11, 2006
Jack Palance and the Tides of History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 AM EST Jack Palance died yesterday at the age of 87. He was one of the great movie villains, and his performance in Shane still sticks in my mind; by a fluke, I was discussing that performance with the editor of this magazine yesterday. The obituary is informative. I had known that Jack Palance had served on a B-24 during the Second World War. In the world in which I grew up, fathers knew facts like that and passed them on. I hadn’t known that Jack Palance was born Walter Jack Palahniuk, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, that his father had worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines for 39 years until dying of black lung disease, and that Palance had bitter memories of his family buying overpriced groceries at the company store, apparently compelled by the company to do so, rather than buying food more cheaply elsewhere. In other respects, he seemed to have liked his childhood, reminiscing that “it was fine to play there in the third-growth birch and aspen, along the sides of slag piles”. These details reminded me of a conversation I had the other night. The October 26 online edition of New Republic had a link to some of the most toxic anti-immigrant TV ads put up by some Republican Congressional candidates running for seats in the South. I watched those ads with a friend, like myself the grandchild of people who had immigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century, and last night she described those ads to another couple. My friend had been simultaneously amused, shocked, and baffled by those ads; trying to describe them, she wondered, “Where do people think they came from? We’re all descended from immigrants.” Some elements within the GOP have very recently wagered that people had forgotten that fact, and although they lost the election, I am not sure they lost that particular bet. My guess is that voters were simply thinking more about other issues, rather than remaining moved by today’s immigrants replaying the dramas that are part of most family histories. I hope I’m wrong.
Jack Palance’s life was in a few respects like the lives of my family, and of my friend’s family, and the families of an awful lot of the people with whom both of us grew up. We had some immigrant grandparents, fathers who had fought in the Second World War, and relatives who had worked in factories and been in unions. What were taken to be the lessons of those experiences, which we had not ourselves experienced, were nonetheless remembered, for when we grew up they were very recent history. Those memories, direct or second hand, had been vital in creating and sustaining the New Deal coalition and kept alive hopes of its revival. Sometime between our childhood and our middle age, that coalition had fallen apart, but hopes for its revival long outlived it. By the 1990s, however, those lessons of recent American history were apparently no longer relevant to modern politics, at least for a lot of people in my generation. The “failures” of the welfare state were now the lesson that counted, and what was taken to be the lesson of Vietnam had for a lot of people replaced the lesson of Munich. A number of what had been taken to be the lessons of the Great Depression, many of them involving the necessity for extensive state regulation of the economy, also seemed outmoded. On the strength of these newer lessons, various new political coalitions were proclaimed to be the paradigm that had replaced the New Deal coalition. Reagan had led one, Clinton another, Gingrich a third, George H. W. Bush a fourth. None of these lasted as long as the New Deal coalition did, so those announcements about a new paradigm did not persuade. I do not mean to imply that some of these lessons—the earlier ones—were simply true, and the later ones false. When I was a kid, most people I knew were chary of crossing a picket line. They remembered relatives, or at least ancestors, who had themselves walked picket lines. I do not know too many people who nowadays refuse to cross a picket line. The strike is thus a weaker weapon, since a strike’s force was often in some part moral. This is not simply forgetting a lesson; some of the vices of some unions are now part of what we know. Munich was a powerful lesson, Vietnam another and perhaps opposite one, whatever its meaning; at this point neither seems universally applicable. The evidence of regulatory capture—the fact that state regulation was often used by the regulated to keep out competition, and led to various abuses—meant that some of the lessons of the Great Depression had to be revised. The assimilation of immigrants who arrived at the turn of the last century may not reliably predict the comparable assimilation of immigrants who arrive today, or who arrive today in Western Europe; history’s lessons aren’t quite like that. But reading about Jack Palance, I experienced an odd pang—the pang of remembering a time when the lessons of history seemed clear and relatively uncomplicated. And reflecting on what Palance’s generation paid for its lessons—black lung disease, simultaneously bleeding and freezing to death at 20,000 feet, facing down the local equivalent of the Pinkertons—I have the suspicion that they had more of a right to hold to them tenaciously, than we have to shriek the perdurable truth of whatever we take to be ours.
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