Still, by making the world of Happy Days an ideal for the age, Quayle opened himself to the perhaps justifiable charge that he could not sufficiently distinguish televised fiction from lived reality, much as George Bush seemingly could not comprehend shopping for one's own groceries. It being an election year, the issue of family values is once more in the news. And although most Americans do not believe their own family life to be in immediate danger, they are quick to perceive their neighbors' being in total disrepair. That perception, Gillis maintains, is an old one, a current that has long flowed through our history. Bill Clinton may trace the decline in family values to an uncaring government and economic system, Bob Dole to the corrupting influence of the welfare state and the Hollywoodization of the culture.
All golden ages are mythic.
The realities are indeed different. One of the cornerstones of our golden age is the notion of the family made up of partners who were monogamous, with sex contained within marriage. Gillis combs the census records to show that, throughout our history, this was not always the case. Premarital pregnancy rates in most American states, he writes, have never fallen below 10 percent, and sometimes have reached 30 percent, especially in rural areas. Indeed, childless couples were viewed as being somehow more unnatural than unwed teenage mothers, a view that remains in many unsuburbanized parts of the world.