"Necessary Trouble: Growing Up in Midcentury," Drew Gilpin Faust - A Review

Today is Veterans Day – Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth. It was originally celebrated as Armistice Day, as it marked the end of fighting on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. But as that truce held, the day assumed a new name. Today, in the U.S. we use this day to celebrate all those who have served in the United States Armed Forces. While I have always been pleased that I did serve in the Army, but as one who completed his military obligation with six months of active duty and five and a half years in the inactive reserves, I have always felt guilty of being lumped with those who were in combat, men and women who put their lives on the line for their country.

 

And I prefer the term Remembrance Day, as we should take a few minutes to think of and thank those who did serve, whether in France, Italy, the Philippines, Korea, South Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or in any place where American soldiers were sent to aid their own nation or that of Allies. And that includes my father who, at age 34 and with four children, served in Italy with the 10^th Mountain Division in 1944-45. Thank God he came home, where he and my mother bore another five children. What we owe them can never be adequately re-paid.

 

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Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

“Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury,” Drew Gilpin Faust

November 11, 2023

 

“This was an issue between me and my conscience

about what was necessary for me to live my life.”

Drew Gilpin Faust (1947-)

Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, 2023  

 

Socrates, who allegedly said that the unexamined life is not worth living, would have praised this reflection of Harvard’s first female president. While we do learn that the average American family in the mid-1950s “ate 850 cans of food annually,” and that they welcomed innovations like “instant oatmeal, instant coffee and Swanson’s TV dinners,” in this book Ms. Faust examines her responses to the social and cultural tectonic shifts that rattled the 1950s and ‘60s, especially the lives of those white and comfortable. 

 

She was born in Virginia in 1947 to parents steeped in the “benevolent paternalistic concern” toward black servants that characterized wealthy, land-owning whites, at a time when prejudices were hidden “beneath a surface of politeness and civility that scarcely masked the assumption of superiority…” She grew up in the northern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley, where her father raised thoroughbreds and her mother tried to train her to be a lady “in a man’s world.” But she also grew up to the rumblings of dissent, emanating from the Civil Rights and Women’s movements, at a time when the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik questioned America’s leadership in science. She came to her majority as earlier protests became crescendos, when drugs and the sexual revolution seized America’s youth, when the Vietnam War raised questions about the Nation’s commitment and morality, and finally when the non-violence preached by Martin Luther King gave way to violence. 

 

From an early age she had been an activist, fighting for freedom. She writes: “Freedom had been a pressing concern for me from the time I was a small child and first launched battles with my mother about clothes and hair and girls’ rules…There was my gradual discovery that others around me confronted far greater injustices…that freedom meant not just ‘freedom from’ but ‘freedom to.’” At age ten, disturbed by black children being unable to attend her school, she wrote President Eisenhower: “Please Mr. Eisenhower, please try and have schools and other things accept colored people.”

 

The book ends in 1968 when, at twenty-one, she casts her first presidential vote, in protest, for comedian Dick Gregory. But student activists were becoming more violent, which was an aversion to her exposure to Quaker precepts at Bryn Mawr: “One of my greatest challenges as an activist was probably that I was too polite for the revolution…I was much more comfortable with a politics grounded in debate and persuasion, and with power exerted through democratic expression, than with the new performative and coercive style coming to characterize young militants.”

 

Her title comes from John Lewis (1940-2020) who inspired her along with many of her generation to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” to effect change. Drew Gilpin Faust went on to get her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught until 2001 when she was appointed dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and Lincoln Professor of History. Her sound judgement and moral sense are infectious. Her examined life is an antidote for our troubled times.