A Midwesterner coming of age in the 1970s probably did not grasp that society was slowly unraveling, though I suppose the signs were there for anyone who cared to look.
Our street was of the typical blue collar, working class variety, peopled by janitors, salesmen, mechanics, truck drivers, and housewives. Of America’s Four Founding Virtues, which sociologist Charles Murray discusses in his latest study, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, industriousness and honesty were common, while marriage and religion were on shakier ground. Was this because society had already begun to unravel, or was it simply the natural order of things?
There is little doubt that divorce was a fashionable feature of the times. While less than 20 percent of couples who married in 1950 divorced, half of couples who married in 1970 did. By the end of the decade, half the homes on our block had been visited by divorce. (Shacking up, however, remained taboo. Even the neighborhood’s obligatory hippie couple was married.)
Even then, marriages were not dissolved over trifles.
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