By Bob Aldrich
As a reporter I once interviewed Harold Russell. He may be remembered for his Oscar-winning performance in William Wyler's 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives. Russell took home two Academy Awards; one for Best Supporting Actor, playing a handless veteran, and another for bringing hope and courage to other veterans. Leonard Maltin's Movie and TV Guide says of the film, "American classic of three veterans returning home after WWII. . . perfectly captured mood of postwar U.S.; still powerful today."
Russell's handlessness was no piece of film fakery. He actually wore two metal hooks in place of his own hands, the result of a grenade explosion. In his hotel room, he removed his shirt to show me the leather straps crossed on his back. He showed me how he could lift a drinking glass and light a cigarette with the two prongs of a hook that separated as he shrugged his shoulders. I didn't ask him how he managed in the bathroom.
I sometimes think of Russell when I hear or read of people whining because their lot in life isn't all they hoped it might be, or who believe their every failing is the fault of a government that hasn't suckled them at its bosom.
Quite aside from political opinions, U.S. Senator Bob Dole is another example of a WWII vet who came home with a shattered body and fought his way back to an active life. And of course there are many others from this and the other wars that, sadly, have drawn us in since 1945.
The moral disintegration of America, so apparent today, did not begin with the men and women who fought that war, or with those at home who backed them. Veterans returned in 1945-46 wanting above all to live "normal" lives, to work and raise families. They bought homes available to GIs at low prices, often in huge housing tracts. Overage for students, they crowded colleges and universities, their tuition and part of their expenses paid by a grateful Uncle Sam; advantages, yes, but well-earned.
When, then, did the downward spiral in moral and ethical values commence? Probably the horrors of the Holocaust had some effect; with human life so cheapened, there was a sense of an assumed value lost. But how did this country, so rich in wealth and productivity, become so poor in its moral and ethical standards? Full of the kind of behavior that throngs cities with crime and drugs? Why is the profane language suggested by the too-worn expression of four-letter words now the common coin of movies, television shows and popular literature, not to mention daily conversation in what our grandparents quaintly called "mixed company?"
No one suggests we return to the days when "bad" words in novels (except those slipped under the counter) were indicated by a letter followed by three or four dashes; or to the Hayes Office censorship of the 1930s; or the wrangle David Selznick underwent before Rhett could say to Scarlett, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"
But the pendulum of lingual smut has swung so far the opposite way that the F-
word is spoken in almost every scene of an action film, and the implications, if not always the specific language, of venery are the very stuff of TV shows aimed at youthful viewers.
True, vulgarity is only one sign of a falling moral barometer. Middle-class Victorians who might have blanched at the sight of a lady's ankle or any reference to childbirth, could manage to restrain their disapproval when children were worked to death in factories and mines. Some of the worst robber barons of the 19th century were models of moral rectitude. Women were expected to do the housework and the washing, raise a dozen children and keep silent when the head of the house laid down the law. On three occasions only was a lady to be named in the newspapers: at her birth, marriage and death. Children were to be stiff little adults, seen and not heard. Life With Father could not have been all that pleasant.
Still, there were standards. There seem to be none today. Let anyone decry their lack or suggest that some reasonable decency should replace the freedom of modern communication and he or she is instantly reviled with the cry of "censorship!"
All civilized behavior relies upon censorship, especially self-censorship. It is self-control that stops the knife from falling, the employee from stealing, the father from deserting his family, the wife from running off with the nearest charmer. It is self-censorship that permits human relations on a higher plane than animal instinct. Freedom demands responsibility both in public and private life.
If we have forgotten that lesson, we could lose more than our hands; as a nation, we could lose our soul.
Bob Aldrich is a columnist and feature writer for the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, June 26, 1996.
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