PeachyTO’s Reviews > The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid > Status Update

In 1916, as the shadow of the Great War made English-speaking people suspicious of loyalties, a governor of Iowa... William L. Harding decreed that henceforth it would be a crime to speak any foreign language in schools, at church, or ever over the telephone in the great state of Iowa. "There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English ... God is listening only to the English tongue."

At the peak of the Red Scare, 32 of the 48 states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York ... it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offense to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the American flag.

Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.

As many as four nuclear detonations a month were conducted in Nevada in the peak years. The mushroom clouds were visible from any parking lot in the city, but most visitors went to the edge of the blast zone itself, often with picnic lunches, to watch the tests and enjoy the fallout afterward. ... Radioactive dust often drifted across Las Vegas, leaving a visible coating on every horizontal surface.

Every summer, at the start of the mosquito season, a city employee ... would come to the neighborhood and drive madly all over the place ... with a fogging machine that pumped out dense, colorful clouds of insecticide through which at least eleven thousand children scampered joyously for most of the day. ... For years afterward whenever I coughed into a white handkerchief I brought up a little ring of colored powder.

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity. When the war ended the United States had $26 billion worth of factories that hadn't existed before the war, $140 billion in savings and war bonds just waiting to be spent, no bomb damage, and practically no competition.