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The New Normalcy is far different from what Warren Gamaliel Harding was talking about in 1920 when, unwittingly adding a word to the language, he called for "not nostrums but normalcy." That was a static, isolationist normalcy; 1957's is a capacity for tolerating crisis and change. With hardly a murmur, key U.S. cities have accepted the sleek Nike antiaircraft missile batteries as next-door neighbors. Scores of cities have faced up to a decline in local industry by all-out and usually successful attempts to attract new industry. Leading example: South Bend, Ind. South Bend was hit hard in 1954 when Studebaker stalled and Singer (sewing machines) pulled out. and a committee of South Bend businessmen set about making the city attractive to industry, saw three dozen firms move in within three years. Last fortnight the erstwhile textile center of New Bedford, Mass, rallied more than 1,000 citizens to a mass meeting to help kick off a new self-help plan for luring new industry.
Age of Jackson. The New Normalcy is not only the process of ensuring prosperity. It is learning to live with what is already here. The Depression-time rarity, the $20 bill engraved with the thin-lipped countenance of Andrew Jackson, has come to be at home in everybody's wallet. In a tangible way, while soothsayers write of a fearful and cautious population, the $20 bill has produced a new "Age of Jackson" and a new age of confidence. And the very familiarity of long green seems to have eased the pursuit of the dollar that Europeans firmly believe to be the U.S.'s chief characteristic. A sign of the times might be detected in Careers, a new board game put out by Parker Brothers, the Salem, Mass, firm that struck it rich with Monopoly in the '30s. In Careers, as in Monopoly, luck is still presented by dice and the practical world by play money, but each player in Careers decides in advance on his own goal—money, fame, happiness or a combination.
Is the New Normalcy a flight from harsh fact, a new isolationism as unreal as Monopoly or Careers? Some observers think so. Says Benjamin Houston Brown, director of Cleveland's Council on World Affairs: "The dangers in the world situation are so painful that people tend to run away from them." Others believe that the U.S. has become too used to leaving things to Ike. "He's the American people's papa," says Miami News Columnist William C. Baggs, "and everybody feels free to leave everything in his hands." But the fact seems to be that the U.S.. perhaps following Ike's example, has learned to live with crisis—and to weight the crises as they come. Americans generally understood the gravity of both Hungary and Suez, but they regard the follow-up steps in the Middle East as one of those things that Ike and Dulles ought to be able to handle without pestering too many other people.
If all this—the low blood pressure and the $20 prosperity—is Normalcy, will it last? Looking straight at the big question mark, the middle-aged momentarily see the ghost of the '30s like an old roll-your-own cigarette machine back in the closet. But for the active executive, as for the active consumer, the question usually brings only a healthy caution or a moment's discomfort. "I don't find anybody really scared," says one steelman, "but there is plenty of studied concern."