True, radio stations happily broadcast songs that would once have cost them their licenses. But tell an ethnic joke or toss a cola can into a plastics recycling bin and the disapprobation of society falls on you with a force that would have impressed Cotton Mather. And as for alcohol, well, George W. Bush has just received a sharp lesson on how far and fast opinions about that have changed. Martin smoked on the air, too. The show wasn't cancelled until 1974.
Moral spasms come and go in cycles.
In the 19th century, temperance had been regarded as a crusade every bit the equal of abolitionism. Indeed, it was often difficult to tell the two movements apart, since the preachers who led both movements constantly analogized the South's enslavement of black bodies to alcohol's enslavement of the drunkard's soul. For the next half a century, boozing was glamorized by Hollywood and indulged by the authorities. Alas for Mr. Bush, at the time he was following the Chairman of the Board's advice, America's mores were shifting radically for the second time in a century. The federal government took over the job of regulating ladder construction.