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At the beginning of the movie Dirty Dancing, declares that she admired her father.
I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad.Toward the end of the movie, however, she criticizes some of his attitudes.
You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break. But you meant everyone who is like you. You told me you wanted me to change the world, to make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard.I have changed my mind about Jake Houseman's politics. I had assumed that he is a liberal Democrat, but now I think that he is a conservative Republican. During the 1950s and early 1960s, medical doctors commonly opposed the Democrats' efforts to interfere in the medical profession.
Although 17-year-old Baby still is too young to vote in 1963, she is a liberal Democrat. Her growing disagreement her father's politics is a major factor in her outburst against him. The disagreement also caused him to mock her global idealism.
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When Baby was born in about 1946 (she is 17 in 1963), she was named Frances. Baby was told that she was named after Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor during the entire Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR died in 1945, a year before Baby was born.
In fact, Jake had been hoping that his second child would be a son, who would be named Franklin. Because the second child turned out to be a daughter, she was named Frances, which is the female version of the name Franklin. In other words, Baby essentially was named not after Francis Perkins, but after Franklin Roosevelt.
Although Jake had wanted a son, Jake and Marge decided that their second child would be their last child. This second child would be "the baby of the family" forever, and so she always was called Baby by her family and by everyone else.
As Baby grew up, she became "Daddy's girl", while her sister Lisa aligned much more with the mother. Jake felt that Baby was his quasi-son.
By the time Baby became an adolescent, Jake might have stopped calling this daughter by the infantile name Baby and begun calling her instead by the tomboyish name Frankie. My explanation for Jake's persistent use of the name Baby was that he changed his political opinion about Franklin Roosevelt. Jake had become so critical of Roosevelt that he resisted calling his daughter any variation of the name Franklin.
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When Baby was born in 1946, Jake was in his mid- or upper-twenties. During the 1950s, Jake prospered in his medical career. He specialized in cardiology and treated wealthy men such as Max Kellerman. Like most doctors, Jake opposed government interference in the medical profession.
When Harry Truman was President during the years 1945 1953, he tried to establish a medical-insurance system that was managed by the Federal Government. The political opposition to Truman's attempt was funded and led by the American Medical Association, which denounced Truman's plan as "socialized medicine".
In these circumstances, Jake left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party. He became a political supporter of President Dwight Eisenhower, whose medical-insurance proposals were rather moderate.
In the 1960 Presidential election, about 83% of Jewish voters voted for the Democrat, President Kennedy, but Jake was among the 17% who voted for the Republican, Richard Nixon. For Jake the decisive political consideration was that the government should refrain from meddling into free-market economics, in particular into the medical profession.
Marge might or might not have shared Jake's political opinions, but anyway Baby paid attention mostly to Jake's political opinions.
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If Jake had become an Eisenhower Republican, then his political opinions would include the following principles:
Free-market economics is the foundation of American prosperity.As Baby grew up, she absorbed these principles from her father.
The government should refrain from meddling in private business.
America is a meritocracy and is the land of opportunity.
People who work intelligently, diligently and honestly should and do prosper.
Successful people should not be taxed excessively.
Society should not be blamed for individuals' faults and failings.
Charity should be done mostly in the private sphere.
In the past year, however, she has been confronted by claims from other people that much of the population of the world, in particular of the USA, lives in poverty. These poor people are disadvantaged by their societies. They could rise from their poverty only if they were helped by society and by government.
Perhaps Baby has heard about or even read Michael Harrington's book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which was published in 1962.
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Baby's disagreement and disillusionment with her father's political opinions has been developing for months before the Dirty Dancing story begins in August 1963. The hostility is mutual. On the family's first night in the hotel's restaurant, both of Baby's parents mock her idealism publicly.
Marjorie Houseman======
Look at all this leftover food. Are there still starving children in Europe?
Baby Houseman
Try Southeast Asia, Ma.
Marjorie Houseman
Right.
Jake Houseman
Robbie, Baby wants to send her leftover pot roast to Southeast Asia, so anything you don't finish, wrap up.
Max, our Baby's going to change the world.
A few days later, however, Baby uses Jake's own teachings against him. Since charity should be done mostly in the private sphere, Jake has taught Baby, she is obligated to exercise private charity to help people in trouble. Jake surely gives Baby a regular allowance and has taught her that she should donate some of her allowance privately to charities.
Therefore, when Baby needed $250 for Penny Johnson's abortion, Baby was able to get it from her father by saying:
You always told me if someone was in trouble, I should help. Could you lend me $250?Jake gives her the money after obtaining only her assurance that the money is not for some illegal purpose. He does not inquire about the recipient of Baby's charity, because he has taught her to donate privately.
Jake assumed mistakenly that the person in trouble was Neil Kellerman.
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From this perspective of Baby's long-developing disagreement with her father about social justice, I analyze Baby's monologue against her father as follows.
You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break, but you meant everyone who is like you.======
Superficially, Baby is complaining that her father has not given Johnny Castle a fair break in regard to the abortion. Jake has insinuated, without learning the facts, that Johnny is guilty in the abortion.
More profoundly, however, Baby is complaining that Jake is unconcerned about the 20% of the US population that lives in poverty because they have not received a fair break in their lives. Jake should recognize that all that poverty should not be attribute to laziness and foolishness. Those poor people have not received a fair break!
Baby insinuates that her father is concerned about this social justice because those poor people are not like him. They are racial minorities or are uneducated or are trapped in chaotic living conditions or are suffering from other personal or social disadvantages that are not entirely their own fault.
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You told me you wanted me to change the world, to make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard.
Superficially, Baby is complaining that her father has prohibited her from socializing with the dancers and the low-class employees who lead unconventional lives -- who drop out of school, work in occasional, itinerant jobs and get involved in pregnancies out of wedlock.
More profoundly, however, Baby is complaining that Jake has been discouraging her from her intention to join the Peace Corps. Jake will try to keep Baby from involving herself dangerously in poverty's squalor -- especially the squalor abroad. He will argue that she can help the world more by working as a professional expert in a powerful institution rather than helping to dig a water well in one Cambodian village.
The Dirty Dancing story takes place about a year after the publication of Michael Harrington's book The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Harrington's book revealed that about 20% of the US population lived in poverty despite the USA's general prosperity. The book provided a major justification for the War on Poverty, which President Lyndon Johnson declared on January 8, 1964 -- about four months after Baby's monologue against her father.
Another passage of that speech follows:
The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.======
Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.
Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.
But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists -- in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.
Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.
We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.
We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.
We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.
We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program.
We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad.
We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity.
We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2 million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power.
We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and counseling in our hardest hit areas.
We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and nursing homes under the Hill-Burton Act, and train more nurses to staff them.
We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1 a month during the employee's working career to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated illness.
We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program, give more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more housing for our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal in our free enterprise system a decent home for every American family.
We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well as low-cost transportation between them.
Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land.Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope--some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.
This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.
It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.
Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts.
For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.
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This article will continue in a Part 3.
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