Unintentionally Funny '56 Newspaper Column about Henry Wallace, "The Prophet"

When I was a kid growing up in South Florida our daily newspaper was the Miami News, since my father worked down in Dade County (we lived in southern Broward) and felt more connected there.  Unfortunately, I would have preferred our own city paper, the Hollywood Sun-Tattler...but little kids often get no say in what they want.  Now I have this feature whereby I can read old newspapers off my computer screen...and since the Sun-Tattler isn't available I decided to make my father's preferred brand my own.  I went back to the day of my birth...October 3rd, 1956...to see what was going on in the world and in people's minds back then, as reflected on the pages of the Miami News Main Edition.  The World Series had just begun between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees, the Cold War was going on strong, and Dwight Eisenhower was in a heated electoral campaign against Democrat Adlai Stevenson for a second term.  In the News' opinion section for that day I read a column by Ralph McGill that led off calling former Franklin Roosevelt's vice-president and 1948 independent presidential candidate Henry Wallace "The Prophet".  Why, it seems that the American economy, which dominated the world in that era, was flying high in early fall of '56 with record employment and only brighter prospects to come.  McGill then made a point of agreeing with Wallace's prediction of a four-day work week in the (then) near future, citing the fact that even Vice-President Nixon was on board with it...and then emphasized that one of the crucial tasks for the future was to educate the people as to how best spend all the oodles of leisure time they were going to be getting.  At this I just laughed and laughed and laughed some more...

There's a lot of irony here, some of it personal.  For one, I remember that in my early childhood my dad had a six-day work week as a letter carrier, not five as the 1956 McGill article claimed for the ongoing national standard.  Secondly, a few years ago my own employer posted jobs involving a four-day work week...but the shifts were ten hours long with the cumulative weekly total still at 40 hours.  I've heard over the years that in Europe conditions have generally improved for workers and that in many countries they have a lot more leisure time than us here in the USA.  Nowadays though, instead of one spouse being able to support the family on a single forty-hour, five-days-a-week job as used to be the case for middle class households, for many both spouses are not only working full time to keep things afloat but also often have extended hours, either through overtime or working at home.  Ralph McGill claimed back then that the wheel of time had turned, but oftentimes people get so stuck in their present situation that they cannot reasonably envision a future that departs in significant ways from it.  But it all makes interesting...and unintentionally funny...reading for me.  Now on to the next hilarious article from the past...