“Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, Ding, ding, ding went the bell ...”
Do you know that song? Most Americans of all ages have heard it.
How about this one?
“Have yourself a Merry little Christmas. Let your heart be light ...”
They are both from the beloved movie from 1944, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” starring Judy Garland when she was 22 and already famous from her dazzling performance in “The Wizard of Oz,” which is probably the most beloved movie of all time.
Oddly, even though I’m a fan of Judy, I had never seen this 1944 film until this week. Her role here is probably not her best—she seems often wooden and a bit detached from the emotional drama—the film overall is utterly enrapturing. Truly, anyone who doesn’t love this piece of old-fashioned Americana is probably broken in other ways.
It’s not just the spectacular music. It’s the plot and lesson, and the fascinating cultural history of what it says about us as a people.
The movie came out just before the end of the war and I can easily imagine that today’s audiences might believe that the world featured in the film is probably the way things were back in the day, complete with gas lamps in homes and corsets for women.
Of course that is ridiculous. All of that was gone long before the Second World War.
In fact, the film made 79 years ago was itself a film reconstruction of an America that had existed 40 years earlier. It was deliberating and romantically retrospective.
So watching it today, we are presented with an America from 120 years ago. And yet it all seems oddly familiar to everyone—probably in the sense that it presents certain ideal forms that continue to serve as models of the kind of lives we wished we lived but are no longer common or even in existence at all.
And this is a tragedy. The answer to what took all that away from us is far too complicated to explore here, but we might briefly reflect on the meaning of the period it recreates, 1903–1904, just before the World’s Fair made itself to St. Louis, Missouri, an event that brought the national spotlight to this city and presented to the nation and world how the United States offers genuine technological and social progress to everyone.
The movie came out a year before the end of World War II but already major forces in American politics, media, education, and otherwise were attempting valiantly to construct a sense of what the postwar normalcy would look like. This movie, which was the most successful musical of the decade, was certainly part of that effort.
And so the major features of the film include a perfectly intact family, a father working as an attorney who supported a wife, five kids, and a grandfather, all living in a very large family home, on a block with lots of other kids who were friends, and next door to a major suitor for the character played by Judy Garland. They frequently went out to eat, rode the trolley, had dances and parties in the home, and had seasonal balls.
There is a notable absence of modern pathology and the constant presence of peace, prosperity, family, music, love, community—all the good things that postwar elite culture codified as essential to the American ideal. Significantly, the time period chosen to be represented in the film was not only before World War II but also ten years before World War I.
This way, the producers could bypass not only two hideous wars but also the Great Depression, Prohibition, the demographic upheaval of urbanization, conscription, unemployment, political centralization, and all the other ills that afflicted the United States in the 20th century. The ideal elevated here was entirely that of the golden age of technology and U.S. culture generally, just after the turn of the 20th century and before the collapse of so much of what was built in the second half of the 19th century.
Incredibly, the film recreates the world of 1903 just beautifully. The attention to detail is simply spectacular. The women’s fashions are precise and period perfect. The men are the same: every suit is of that heavy woolen cloth you cannot buy anymore, and every collar in the entire film is detachable, completely consistent with what everyone wore in the old days before the commercialization of attached collars during the Second World War.
In the story, the family patriarch is being transferred to the big city of New York and he naturally assumes that everyone in the family would be thrilled at the news. But the opposite happens. Two of the girls have love interests in St. Louis, and the son too has a thing going on. The little girl loves her life so much, particularly the snow people she has worked so hard to build in the backyard.
Also with the World’s Fair on the way, they all have the sense that the town of St. Louis itself is wonderful and truly up and coming, and just as great as New York City if not better because here they can live in this big house which they have come to adore. So no one wants to move. They dread it completely. They convince the father—again the sole breadwinner on the salary of a lawyer—and he finally agrees that they should stay.
The message is of course that the best of the best that this gloriously free country has to offer is potentially available from sea to shining sea. There is no reason to travel to some far-flung city to find the good life. The good life is for everyone in this wonderful country.
In a nation torn apart from two wars, depression, and massive corruption and crime from Prohibition, this was precisely the message that needed to be heard in 1944. This was the America that everyone wanted back. Major efforts after the war, from the federal government to Hollywood to major media and every city, tried every possible mechanism to put it back in place.
In many ways this did work. Life in postwar America was good if not great. The savings pent up during wartime were unleashed for investment and business building. The men were back in normal jobs again. Women with children did not need jobs outside the home because prosperity came back. Every soldier returning from war found a job or got a free college education. The Cold War began in 1948 but it was not disruptive to domestic life, apart from the periodic nuclear-war drill in public school.
The interstate highway system began to be built, and every household eventually obtained a home, indoor plumbing and heating, cool new appliances, fabulous cars, and televisions everywhere.
And how long did this new and settled social system last? Probably until about 1963, when the assassination of a popular president reintroduced instability into American life.
And matters only got worse from there, with an unpopular new president, the massive expansion of the welfare state, a new war in Vietnam, and then more political killings. Cities burned from racial conflict, and a new generation felt completely alienated from their parents. Conscription for the war terrorized a whole generation and entrenched deep political conflict.
So regarding postwar peace and prosperity, what are we talking about here in terms of years? Between 1945 and 1963, we had 18 years, approximately one generation. Then we found ourselves back dealing with war, poverty, social strife, political upheaval, and more rounds of tears and terror.
It was a glass house, built and then shattered by events.
All that said, the dreams you discern from “Meet Me in St. Louis” really do represent an ideal type and a glorious effort to recover what was lost. We need the same in our time.
“The Trolley Song” comes from the town streetcar of course. There are a few still operating, one in San Francisco that still functions for public transit. But of course these days that town, once a glorious treasure in the United States, is downright uninhabitable today. It was already falling apart before lockdowns but those wrecked what remained.
A major theme of our time is nostalgia—Dolly Parton, Cher, 70s rock, the Andrews Sisters, shows about the Gilded Age, and a generalized looking back fondly—and rightly so. And yet the whole of the woke movement is trying even to take that from us, from trashing the Founding Fathers and religion to bashing the family to even upending the idea of biological sex. Their whole goal is radical cultural reconstruction such that the past is always hateful and the woke vanguard is in charge of making the future.
It’s become preposterous to the point that vast numbers of Americans—the overwhelming majority—are fed up and ready for a new direction. It’s a bit late in the day but we desperately need mighty efforts to save this country from doom. It’s possible. We’ve done it before.
