American Rifle - Alexander Rose [181]
Americans had emerged from a hugely destructive and expensive world war only to find themselves involved in another, potentially world-ending one—against the forces of China and the Soviet Union. American leaders were alarmed at Communism’s seemingly inexorable advance and just as worried that Americans were ill equipped to withstand it.
As millions of GIs handed in their M1s and headed home, they expected a change for the better in their living standards as part-payment for their sacrifices. They got it. Over the course of the 1950s the postwar boom increased the real weekly earnings of factory workers by 50 percent, the gross national product jumped by 51 percent, and a country with 6 percent of the world’s population produced one-third of earth’s goods and services. For the first time regular, normal Americans owned television sets (in 1946 there were 17,000 sets in the land; within three years Americans were buying 250,000 each month) and could afford to take their family vacations at Disneyland (founded in 1955), give their teenage kids enough of an allowance to buy an Elvis Presley LP, and buy the lady of the house dinner at a fashionable restaurant with a Diners Club card (first issued in 1950) as reward for all her diligent housework (helped by an array of vacuum cleaners, stainless-steel sinks, food mixers, coffeemakers, refrigerators, and washing machines).
Some members of the affluent society did not regard it with unalloyed admiration. Blacks were painfully aware of the underlying racial tensions of the time, while NRA members and pro-marksmanship soldiers became convinced that their fellow citizens were getting soft bellies from the good living. Teaching youths to shoot targets would increase their confidence, impart to them the meaning of manly character, and keep them on the straight and narrow.
In the 1950s the population drain from the countryside to the cities and suburbs—a third of Americans lived in the latter by 1960, up from 19.5 percent in 1940—was a particularly worrisome phenomenon for many: one can’t hunt in Los Angeles, let alone in Levittown. If boys did not learn how to shoot at an early age, the legacy of the American Rifleman would die out. The rot had already seeped into society: those boys’ teenage brothers were gyrating their hips to “Jailhouse Rock” and college freshmen had begun checking out those hep Beat poets.43
To the NRA, the decline of marksmanship within even the army said it all: affluence was forging wimps. “Let’s admit,” opined Bill Shadel, former American Rifleman editor, in the midst of the Korean War, “that we have become largely a nation of urbanites, dependent on machines and a proximity with our fellows. Even the farms have been caught in this dependency.” In his experience “American soldiers, trained in formal tactics, are afraid of the dark, as infantile as that may sound! They are afraid of the woods, afraid of the terrain. They shun night attacks. They have shown themselves vulnerable to infiltration [and] encirclement.” What trainees (and American males in general) needed was to learn the “art of the hunter,” a tradition handed down by generations of frontiersmen who had needed no machines or middle-level office jobs to bring home the bacon and kill their foes. It was imperative, thought Shadel, to raise boys as junior riflemen and to teach them their “woodsmanship” so that they might be turned into “confident and self-reliant” warriors willing and able to defeat the Godless Red Menace.44
Another editorialist for The American Rifleman detected the origins of the decline of the frontier tradition in the rise of Marshall-style “aimless fire.” The very idea led to loss of self-control and (quoting General Walsh of the National Guard Association) a “tendency to hoard ammunition; lack of motivation; fear of retaliation; indolence.” Just as bad, the boom times had wrought unwholesome changes in the officer corps. “Not so many years ago the Army put great stress on training in rifle marksmanship,” but these days, rued Walsh (and the