Cornies: ‘Ageless ideals’ being tossed aside? History shows that’s nothing new

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Ask a clutch of classic car buffs to name an automobile that symbolizes the apex of North America style and beauty, and many will settle on the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. Its flashy chrome and iconic tail fins signalled a bold confidence and the start of an era of “space-age” vehicle design.

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In terms of world events, however, 1957 brought more ominous developments. By year’s end, the postwar optimism of the late 1940s and early ’50s had given way to considerable tension and anxiety, especially at international levels.

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In March of 1957, Canada officially entered what would become a worldwide recession, which saw the unemployment rate rise dramatically. The economic downturn played a role in the election, in June, of John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives to a minority government, toppling prime minister Louis St-Laurent’s Liberals, who had won majorities in 1949 and 1953.

In July, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line was activated to detect incoming Soviet bombers and offer an early warning of any trans-polar invasion. To further buttress continental security, Canada and the United States signed the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) agreement in September.

Although the end of the Second World War had come a dozen years earlier with the use of the first atomic bombs by the United States on Japan, the perils of the nuclear age rapidly were becoming apparent.

In September, an accident at the Mayak plutonium production site at a closed city in the East Urals of the Soviet Union caused widespread contamination, affecting 270,000 people. In terms of radioactivity released, it still ranks second only to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

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Then in October, a fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in England released radioactive fallout across the United Kingdom and parts of Europe. Eventually, more than 200,000 deaths, most due to cancers, were attributed to the fire.

The successful launch of Sputnik 1 on Oct. 4 stoked fears in the West of the growing dominance of the Soviet Union, not only in space but also in surveillance. The thought of a Soviet spacecraft circling the Earth every 96 minutes was viewed in Canada and the United States as a provocation at best; an unnerving weakness of national security at worst. Sputnik revived the Cold War, which had abated a little after the death of dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953.

In November, the Soviet Union doubled down, launching Sputnik 2, with a dog named Laika on board. She died of hypothermia during the craft’s fourth orbit (there was never a plan to safely return it to Earth); nonetheless, the achievement underlined Soviet supremacy in the space race.

When the United States attempted to respond on Dec. 6 with the launch of a satellite of its own, the Vanguard rocket blew up on its launch pad.

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The uptick in tensions between the Soviet empire and the West was felt from the halls of diplomacy to the classrooms of elementary school children.

On Christmas Day, a 31-year-old Queen Elizabeth II delivered her traditional broadcast to the Commonwealth, the first to be televised. The queen also referred to another first, her opening of the new Canadian Parliament in October, “the first time that any Sovereign had done so in Ottawa.”

The theme of her address, however, was the disorientation of so many around the world, caused by “the speed at which things are changing all around us.” She referred to difficulties “caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery. They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.”

She continued: “Today we need a special kind of courage, not the kind needed in battle, but a kind which makes us stand up for everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.”

This holiday season and in the months ahead, as wars rage in Ukraine and the Middle East, disinformation rattles democracies, authoritarianism rises anew, traditional alliances shift and food insecurity and homelessness rise, that’s exactly the type of courage we’ll need.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist. Reach him at cornies@gmail.com

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