Retroculture- Taking America Back Read online

  Arktos

  London 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Arktos Media Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  ISBN

  978-1-912975-30-3 (Softcover)

  978-1-912975-31-0 (Ebook)

  Editing

  Martin Locker and Charles Lyons

  Layout

  Tor Westman

  Cover

  Andreas Nilsson

  Foreword

  What’s gone is gone. You have to keep moving forward. There’s no turning back. You can’t stand in the way of progress. You can’t live in the past.

  Everyone has heard these sayings and a hundred others like them. But recently, the tone of voice people use when they say them has begun to change. They used to say them calmly, matter-of-factly, perhaps with a slight chuckle, the way you would tell a child that he really can’t fly like Peter Pan. Now, the tone of voice is defensive, insistent, like a person who is trying to keep someone else from blurting out an awful secret.

  We are told we must not doubt progress. Still, the growing number of people who are comparing the last few decades to what came before can’t help suspecting that somehow, life was better then. We catch glimpses of how it used to be: an old song from the fifties or the thirties on the radio; a black and white photo of a big city street in years past, without potholes or garbage or slums; a beautiful dress from someone’s attic; a suburb where the trolley line used to run, with big trees and sidewalks and front porches and people outside talking to their neighbors.

  People are noticing these things, and wondering. But we still get the feeling we shouldn’t talk about them. If we do, we’re told, more harshly, that doubting progress is bad. You must keep moving forward. You have to keep trying things that haven’t been done before. Terrible things will happen if instead you try to do what people did in your grandparents’ day. You don’t want to give up modern medicine, do you? You don’t want to go back to Jim Crow racial prejudice, do you? Do you want children working twelve hours a day in dark factories?

  The answer is, of course not. But we’re still not sure how most of what our grandparents did made the world so terrible. We don’t remember them being against good health. We never noticed that they went out of their way to be mean to people. In fact, we thought they were pretty nice. And some things are better now. Most people live longer, and some groups of people have more freedom. That’s all good.

  So, what is it that attracts us when we catch a glimpse of how people used to live? It’s summed up in a word that didn’t even exist fifty years ago. That word is lifestyle.

  We get the feeling we have forgotten a lot about how to live. We have “home entertainment centers,” but our grandparents seemed to find life more interesting. We can get anywhere fast on jumbo jets, but they got to see more from the window of the train. We have email and texting, but people in the old movies talk so elegantly, and we can still enjoy reading the beautifully written letters grandmother saved, letters written by ordinary people. We may have more “leisure time,” but they seemed less rushed, less pressured, less under stress.

  And amazingly, those older lifestyles often had a lot less impact on the environment. People knew less about the dangers of chemicals and plastics and poisons, but they used a lot less of those things too — sometimes none at all. They didn’t need as much energy as we do. They didn’t consume as much — or waste as much. They knew how to reuse many things long before the word recycling was ever heard.

  When all is said and done, we seem to have lost a lot that was really worthwhile in the last five decades or so. It’s not surprising that we yearn to have some of it back again. Nor is it wrong. We know, when we think about it, that it should be possible to recapture the good things people used to do — without giving up modern medicine or sending kids to work in sweatshops.

  Much of what we used to have is still around, in bits and pieces here and there. We come across it every day: comfortable, well-built old houses, nice old ways of dressing and talking, old courtesies we find refreshing. Why can’t we gather these things up and rebuild the best of what used to be? Why can’t we restore old lifestyles the same way people are restoring gracious old houses?

  The answer is, we can. And when we look around, we begin to see that a growing number of people are doing it.

  John J. Patrick

  Chapter I

  Signs of Change

  Very often, the most obvious things are the hardest to see.

  At the end of a long, dreary, dismal winter, we are all eager for spring. Then, sometime around March or early April a new day dawns, with a fresh smell in the air, a new warmth, and a powerful sense of quickening life. It’s spring, and no one can mistake it.

  But long before the first real day of spring, signs of the change in seasons are showing. The first green shoots pop up under the snow. Branches of forsythia take on a hint of color. Country people see these signs, but most of us miss them. Laden down with our daily cares and burdens, we do not notice spring is coming until, suddenly and gloriously, it is upon us.

  So it is also with greater changes. Here and there, signs pointing to something new spring up independently. Most of us do not notice them. We do not “connect the dots” to see the outline of the future they portend.

  Such signs are now appearing, in places like Medina, Ohio. Like many other small towns in the mid-west, Medina was mostly built in the late-19th century and the first years of the 20th. Its Victorian buildings were grouped around a central square of trees and green lawn, along with a statue or two and a small fountain. Over the years, some of the buildings had become run down. Others had been modernized with metal and plastic facades and signs. A few had been torn down; one corner of the square faced a modern gas station. To most people’s eye, the town had nothing special to distinguish it.

  But as early as 1967, some Medina citizens began looking at their town through a different eye. They saw it as it once had been, in, say, 1910. They imagined what it might have been like to go to an ice cream social on the square in that year. The buildings were new, clean, and handsome. They reflected the elegant style of the Victorians in their arched windows, elaborate cornices and mansard roofs. They realized that once upon a time, Medina had been a beautiful town. They knew it could be so again.

  So the people of Medina turned back the clock. They formed a citizens’ group called the Community Design Committee and set out to return Medina to its turn of the century appearance. They fixed up the buildings that had become run down, restoring them, not modernizing them. They stripped the ugly modern facades and signs off the old buildings that had acquired them. They tore down the gas station, and in its place built a Victorian bank so well designed that an observer has no clue that it was built in the 1980s, not the 1880s. They engaged Amish carpenters to build a Victorian bandstand on the square.

  If you visit Medina on a Friday evening in the summertime, you will usually find a band playing in the bandstand. Around it are gathered Medina’s citizens, listening to turn of the century tunes and enjoying an ice cream social.

  What happened in Medina is happening in a growing number of American communities. Instead of tearing down or modernizing old buildings, people are preserving and restoring them. They are turning back the clock.

  Telluride, Colorado, is another Victorian town. As in Medina, the old buildings have been r
estored and the town again looks and feels as it might have in the 1890s. But Telluride has gone even further: all new buildings must be in a Victorian style. Real estate developers have joined in the new movement with enthusiasm. As one article on the town puts it, in Telluride, “developers have a fervor for the past.”

  Big cities, too, are joining in the effort to preserve and restore their history. Citizens’ commissions in many cities have been empowered to channel and guide development to preserve local history. They insist that old buildings be preserved in their appearance, even as they are converted to new uses. In Washington, D.C., not only are famous government buildings like the Capitol protected, so are many 19th-century commercial buildings. Some Washington streets are rapidly recovering their 19th-century appearance.

  There are other signs of a change in season. One is Seaside, Florida. In recent years, his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has become Britain’s most noted architectural critic. Perhaps surprisingly, one of his favorite new towns is in America: Seaside, Florida. Seaside was designed from the beginning to have the feel of an American seaside community of the past. Houses are required to have porches, gazebos and pavilions are scattered throughout the town, and everyone has a picket fence. Seeing Seaside as a prototype for new communities built to look and feel like old-fashioned small towns, Prince Charles wrote:

  People will say, ‘It’s all very well for those with money…’ But I believe that the lessons they’ve worked out at Seaside have very serious applications both in rural areas and in our cities. The founders certainly believe that a sense of real community will grow here; that people will live here. I wish them well.1

  The architects who designed Seaside, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a husband and wife team, have proposed more than thirty new towns built along historical lines, some of which have been built. Time magazine wrote of their work:

  It seems incredible that such a simple, even obvious premise — that America’s 18th and 19th century towns remain marvelous models for creating new suburbs — had been neglected for half a century. … Today Duany and Plater-Zyberk … and their allies are proposing to go all the way, to build wholly new towns and cities the way our ancestors did.

  Architects Larry Garnett and Associates are offering plans for new houses built to a style that suggests the 1920s and 1930s. One such is the “Hampshire.” With a steeply sloped, long roof, quaint dormers and a stone-framed entryway, the “Hampshire” suggests both the English countryside and American homes of eighty or ninety years ago. An important fact about this house is that it is not just for the wealthy. With just 717 square feet, it is not a large house, and is affordable to build.

  Other firms are offering updated house plans from earlier eras, Victorian through to colonial. Moreover, many new housing developments include such houses. You can often recognize them by their large, comfortable front porches. The front porch had almost completely disappeared from new houses by the 1950s. But more and more people now want what a big porch offers: a place for the family to gather and talk, away from the television and the computer but close to the neighbors and passers-by, who can join in the conversation easily and informally. The front porch serves the trend toward a life oriented more toward people and less toward machines.

  Ralph Lauren has become one of America’s foremost interior designers. For several years, his interiors have looked strongly toward the past. They are intended to give a feel of life in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Why? Because those were times when home life was strong and comforting. He makes heavy use of artifacts from those periods — signs, advertisements, toys and the like — as well as traditional fabrics and furniture designs. His rapidly growing popularity and influence attest to the fact that Americans want to look to the past as they move into the future.

  Advertisements and marketing often herald a major change in fashion. More and more ads are now hearkening back to the past. An advert for Hendrick’s Gin makes extensive use of aesthetics and themes from the 1920s and 30s, as well as harking back to the days of the British Empire. The Jennings Motor Group has recently launched a project in which several modern cars from Audi, Mercedes and Ford are given retro makeovers, and presented in their ads in a retro style. The ad agencies and designers are clearly on to the same thing Ralph Lauren has discovered: the past sells. People want to buy products that remind them of the past and that take them back into an earlier time. Advertisers sense a change in taste and style, away from a cold, ultra-modern look toward warm, traditional materials, looks and feelings. People are willing to pay to recover some of their heritage.

  Traditional styles of dressing are making a major comeback. Men are again wearing double-breasted brown suits with floral ties and even two-toned shoes in some cities. Several online stores are catering specifically to the Retroculture crowd, offering every style from the 1920s right up to the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the most popular of these stores is Unique Vintage, whose clothes are new (rather than second hand) and offer a variety of collections for women. The J. Peterman Company’s catalogue stresses the heritage look of many of its products: the Gatsby Pants, the 1950s Tie-Front Blouse and the 1903 Vintage Cologne are all examples of this shift towards “Retro-chic” in fashion. In Britain, the brand 20th Century Chap offers a range of classic British styles from the early part of the last century, with collections focusing on the pre-WWII look and the 1940s.

  Clothing styles are a major part of fashion, and more and more they are pointing toward the past. People are buying clothes that suggest earlier times because they like the feeling of those times: the elegance, the suggestion of manners and civility, the return of the idea of “ladies” and “gentlemen,” instead of “male” and “female” (and those sometimes hard to tell apart). Men’s hair is getting shorter, too, while a recent ad for women’s hair stylists speaks of the “Retro look: Finger waves,2 just like those popular in the 1930s, that are making a comeback.” “Unisex” is clearly “out,” and the blow-dryers have gone to the attic.

  Entertainment is showing a move back toward the past, with movies such as The Great Gatsby doing very well in the box offices and reviving interest in the aesthetics of the period. A look back is evident more broadly in movies as well: more and more films resemble those of the “classic” movie era — the 1930s, 40s and 50s — in plot, acting style and look.

  The major networks are also discovering the new audience for what is coming to be known as “retro television.” The popular AMC series Mad Men, which follows the lives of several men working for an advertising company in 1950s and 1960s New York, not only received huge viewing figures but also re-introduced a generation to the style, swing and sophistication of the clothing and culture of 1950s America. A similar story can be found with the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, set in the Prohibition era, which revels in the aesthetics of the period.

  Train travel is also making a comeback. Amtrak’s trains are packed, especially in the summer months, as more and more Americans discover the pleasures of riding the train. Trains enable people to see the country, not just fly over it. The train cuts through all the little towns and cities — often right through people’s back yards. It offers unsurpassed views of America’s famous sights — the Rocky Mountains, the Hudson River, the Great Plains. In the dining car you can relax over coffee or steak and watch the country roll by. In a car on the interstate, you’re lucky to see more than the radiator of a truck in your rear-view mirror. An article published on July 18, 2018 in The Daily Mail revealed that Amtrak is bringing back their glass-domed observation car on two more routes, the first running through Brunswick, Portland and Boston, and the second through Montreal, Albany and New York. This is a great indicator of the success of the company in the modern era, and the desire by people for this kind of “Retro travel.” The train offers many of the things people will be looking for in the future — a slightly slower, more relaxed pace of living, community with other people and places, and a chance
to look outward rather than inward.

  Classic “motoring” is also coming back. People have already discovered the pleasures of an old way to get around, with several cars from the early 21st century capturing the spirit and aesthetic of “Retro” driving. The 2015 Ford Mustang, the BMW Z8, the revived Mini Cooper and several of the Jaguar sports cars all hark back to the vintage age of motoring, without sacrificing modern comforts and engines. Not to mention the array of “kit cars” which allow people to build their own, with many models mimicking the most well-known classic cars.

  Young people, especially young families, are going to church again. Starting in the 1960s, the last place many young people wanted to be seen was in church. “Liberation” was then the latest fashion, and the Ten Commandments were one of the things young people wanted to be liberated from. So, for that matter, were families. The fashion in the 1960s and 70s was “relationships,” temporary arrangements for “living together,” not marriage. Sad experiences, in the form of broken homes, children raised without parents’ love, and lonely people, have made some of today’s young people wiser. Families and marriage are coming back. Many young families (and some single people too) want to do things that strengthen their attachment to older, proven, solid ways of living. Going to church is one of those things. And so is belief in God. Far from being unfashionable, belief in God is something more and more young people are open about and look for in others.

  The list of old-fashioned things people are finding fun to do is growing daily. More mothers are staying home to take care of their children and getting together with other women in their neighborhood who are doing the same thing. Families are finding board games and puzzles good alternatives to the television or the computer for family entertainment. Family-oriented amusement parks, which were big in the 1890s through the 1930s, have made a tremendous comeback through places like King’s Dominion.