Who do you believe in,
Marion Morrison or John Wayne?

   Marion Morrison was an actor from Winterset, Iowa who avoided service in World War ll and married three times.

John Wayne was the actor who became the mythic American hero—self-reliant, brave, and the embodiment of laconic male virtue.

   The two men are, of course, one and the same person. Marion as John became, as writer Garry Wills observed, "the figment of other people's imaginations." He became the embodiment of what many Americans wished or thought was true.

   The same sort of dichotomy exists in the way we view the traditional American family. In The Way We Never Were, historian Stephanie Coontz examines the myths and the realities of the American family.

   What she finds is that the 1930s were not like the Waltons, and the 1950s not like the Cleavers, Nelsons, or Andersons. Victorian and colonial times, antebellum and post bellum America, were not times most of us would prefer to live in either.

   Her book is subtitled "American Families and the Nostalgia Trap," and in it she provides a picture of the diversity and challenges of family life. If the 50s were a good time for families, it was in larger part because real wages increased by more than they had in the previous half century. From 1945 to 1960, the gross national product increased by 250%.

   Yet many women of the period felt trapped in a life of "booze, bowling, bridge, and boredom"; overt racism was rampant; gays were trapped in the closet; and physical abuse, sexual abuse, and alcoholism in the home were common but concealed.

   It is not helpful to think that problems today are caused by "people's rotten values," nor is it historically accurate. Families have always been challenged by the times, and The Way We Never Were presents a fascinating, wide-ranging view of our past.

   Coontz's companion book, The Way We Really Are, is subtitled "Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families." As the back cover suggests, "Every kind of family…has strengths that can be fostered and vulnerabilities to be avoided.

   "Stepfamilies, dual-earner couples, single-parent families, and divorced but cooperative families must operate in different ways, but with the right economic, cultural, and social support systems, all incarnations of the family can succeed."

   If you ever clinched an argument by making reference to "the liberal media," you probably won't like Stephanie Coontz, but she is an author worth reading.

From The Way Were Really Are:

--Robert Knight of the Family Research Council once defined family values as "a shorthand term for the channeling of sexuality into marriage and all that comes of that: family structure; parental responsibility for children's education, welfare, and moral and spiritual well-being."

About this, Coontz observes "… by this definition Mafiosi families could place high on the list of leading moral exemplars. After all, who believes more firmly in (female) premarital virginity, marital permanence, and taking care of one's own?"