It is fitting that each new year inspires us to look back to the past and ahead to the future. January is named for Janus, the ancient Roman god of gates and doorways who has two faces gazing in opposite directions.
As 2024 dawns, the world is wracked with wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East while here at home the specter of dictatorship and demagoguery stalks the land as Donald J. Trump seems poised to return to the White House. Babies born in the United States in this new year of 2024 might still be alive in the year 2100, but they may find that science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was correct when he quipped that “the future’s not what it used to be.”
A glimpse back just 50 years into our past gives us a view that illuminates our present while showing ominous portents for our future. In 1974, stories ranging from Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home-run record to the zany “streaking” fad to the battle over busing in Boston during desegregation of the city’s public schools made headlines across America. Then as now, would-be book censors demanded the banning of books that they considered objectionable. In West Virginia in 1974, hundreds of parents led by fundamentalist ministers protested against their children—or anyone else’s children—being exposed to J.D. Salinger’s iconic novel The Catcher in the Rye.
By far the biggest domestic political story of 1974 was President Richard Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal that exposed the criminality of his administration. Unlike today, many Republicans then were appalled at the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of a GOP president. Even conservative Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater met with Nixon and urged him to resign. Facing impeachment, a possible prison sentence, and loss of his presidential perks and pension, Nixon stepped down and Gerald Ford became president. Ford then pardoned Nixon just a month after the resignation. Roger Stone, an early and enthusiastic Nixon loyalist during the Watergate caper, later became an eager administration crony during the Trump regime.
In 1974, as the Watergate scandal wound toward its denouement, I was in Washington with some 10,000 Americans marching through the streets of the nation’s capital demanding the impeachment and ousting of President Nixon. It was a sunny April day in D.C. as the throng chanted “Jail to the thief” and “Throw the bum out.” The procession was led by an Edsel automobile towing a cage with a person inside it wearing a Nixon mask and a convict uniform. A sign on the Edsel said, “Don’t trade a lemon for a used Ford.” The Washington Post, which had exposed Nixon’s Watergate crimes, said that the mostly young marchers had come to the city from all along the east coast and from as far away as Indiana. Though other Washington rallies for other causes had been larger, the Washington Star newspaper called the 1974 protest “the first large-scale march and rally for impeachment” to take place in the capital.
Anti-Nixon forces used humor during their impeachment rally in Washington in 1974, but overseas in that year politics took a deadly turn as fascist groups in Italy longed for the days when dictator Benito Mussolini had promised to make Italy great again under his iron rule. On May 28, 1974, an Italian fascist group called the New Order set off a bomb during an anti-fascist protest by leftists in the city of Brescia, killing eight people and injuring more than 100. The bombers called for a “white coup” to bring back fascism in Italy. Just weeks later, on Aug. 4, 1974, Italian neo-fascists killed 12 people and injured 48 when they set off a bomb on a passenger train as it rolled through the countryside. “We will drown democracy under a mountain of dead,” the group threatened in a communique.
Fast-forward to America in 2024. Democracy is under threat in this nation today and fascists grasp for power in a country that calls itself the land of the free. The words of French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr from 1849 apply today: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
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