Out On a Limb: “I have a confession to make,” began Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, on Sept. 19. “I like to smoke marijuana.” Image President Trump in 2016, the year he told an interviewer, “I wouldn’t be standing here today if it weren’t for alcohol.”CreditJonathan Ernst/Reuters This was not a joke. Senator Grassley was a first-term senator who had campaigned with a great fanfare, but he had begun to lose attention, including in his own state. His comment took on a life of its own, as if to say that smoking pot was the way these modern politicians—these self-styled “normals” — expressed normalcy. This, after all, was hardly the first time Mr. Grassley had let slip an off-color quip. Earlier this year, after being informed that the Senate had been considering a bipartisan immigration bill, he retorted, “This is what they were working on for 20 years. We can’t get the border bill passed?” While such remarks might have been surprising for a senator, they were hardly out of the ordinary for Mr. Grassley. He was born in 1942 in Iowa. He was part of the first generation to grow up listening to Elvis Presley, watching Saturday morning cartoons, and watching President John F. Kennedy and other national leaders deliver speeches on television. By Mr. Grassley’s account, though, he did not drink alcohol until high school. By college he was smoking a pipe, and by the late 1960s he was puffing on a large cigar or two. He gave up the cigar smoking when his wife caught the habit and started smoking a pipe. She stopped when she became pregnant. Mr. Grassley also quit marijuana smoking. “You’re taking me back, aren’t you?” his wife had asked. They made a pact, and he kept his word. This account was not unusual. It was the backdrop to the rise of normalcy in the United States in the last few decades—the belief that everyone had smoked marijuana and many had done other drugs. But it was not quite true. By the time of the early presidents like Washington and Adams, most Americans were teetotalers. Alcohol consumption in the United States did not become commonplace until after World War II. The federal government did not become a major employer until after World War II. And many major employers have remained staunch teetotalers, including Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Apple, IBM, Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Google. The culture of work in America began to change only with the rise of unions and the fight for the right of workers to unionize. In the world of popular culture, alcohol abuse and drug use were common even into the early part of the 20th century, when most people lived in small towns and everyone knew everyone else. The “red-hot jazz” performers such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong often drank too much. In 1919, at the height of Prohibition, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had two full-time officials on staff and was building a state-of-the-art laboratory in New York’s Lower East Side to study the chemistry of alcohol, an office at the Library of Congress was tasked with examining every scientific article and study on drugs, and the Bureau had even set up a school that trained students on how to detect and prevent drug use. And, though it is a stereotype, it’s a good one: Most Americans smoked a lot of cigarettes. Men smoked about 1.1 packs of cigarettes per day. (The average is now about 1.8 packs per day, though it has dropped from about 20 a day in 1945.) The most-popular cigarette of the era was Chesterfield (an American brand that is now owned by Philip Morris, whose executives have sworn off cigarettes) and Kool (still a major brand, with Kraft as its parent company) was the most popular cigarette for women. This image may come as a shock to people who grew up in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, the decades marked by rising per-capita incomes and the rise of the youth culture. The latter was often marked by a certain innocence—there was a sense of possibility that would later be replaced by the reality of the 21st century, where things are not so simple. That is to say, there are no easy answers about the nature of the “good life” for many Americans today. The country’s prosperity has only grown. Since 1970, per-capita incomes have gone up by more than 75 percent. America’s economy is now among the world’s largest. There are few places in the world where there are so many people with such disposable income. In 2016, America was home to 19.4 percent of the world’s people, but had nearly 50 percent of the world’s total household income. Of the 100 richest people in the world, 62 are American. If the material conditions of the average American citizen seem a bit lacking, there are explanations. First, the global competition for goods and workers is fierce and, at least in terms of wages, the U.S. has lagged behind many other nations. Second, even as the average American has prospered, many households have had to tighten their belts. The “American Dream” as the term is commonly used is misleading. This concept gained prominence when an author named James Truslow Adams published his book The American Dream in 1931, but it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who promoted this version of America when he spoke about the Four Freedoms on Jan. 6, 1941. During the same month, more than 75 years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt was on the receiving end of a “hail-storm of protest” against these sentiments. “I should much rather see you defeat Hitler than elect Roosevelt,” wrote an Iowa newspaperman. By then, as Mr. Roosevelt would note when he signed an executive order in May 1944, Americans had gone from being “one of the most economically illiterate peoples in the world” to a people who recognized that “we must protect the great things our system has brought us.” Americans were also prosperous, yes. But it was less the American Dream than a “normalcy” they were after. It was enough for Americans to know they were not going to be poor, that they were a middle-class nation in the making. This was not a utopian vision, but it was a view of the future that made many Americans feel normal. In a country where there was a belief in equality and that everyone would share in the gains and the benefits of growth, this did not make everyone feel a loss. A normal life did not have to be materialist, but it was not egalitarian. In The New York Times of Nov. 23, 1943, an article was titled “The American Way of Life.” It noted that there are more Americans in the United States than ever before, including 2.6 million soldiers in the Army and Navy (which was a record high). “So large a percentage of the total population,” it reported, “has never before been in the armed forces at the same time.” And so it was that, by the end of the 20th century, not only were Americans becoming wealthier, but they also felt themselves to be more “normal” and “normal people.” And as a nation became less equal and more unequal, the notion of normalcy was bound up with a sense of inequality. Americans now spend an enormous amount of time each day staring at screens. These screens are not only big screens, but small screens—for instance, iPads or cellphones. In 1983, there were 200 million American households with televisions. In 2010, there were only 140 million. A third of the American population now owns a tablet or other tablet-like device, with estimates that they will spend more than $3 billion on streaming movies alone in the year ahead. For most Americans, that will be another day at the office. Image Frank Sinatra at home in Los Angeles, 1950, holding a cocktail, in the 1950s.CreditUniversal-International/Getty Images It’s not only that the average American works longer hours today than they did in the 1960s, but they also work longer hours than the average employed person did as recently as the early 1990s. Part of the reason was that, by 2014, almost a third of workers were part-time. That meant that not only was work now being done on a part-time basis, but those days at work also involved the possibility of working later, if need be. The median wage grew in 2016 by over 6 percent, a figure in line with the trend of the postwar period. But it still fell far behind what it was in the 1950s and ’60s—an era of almost relentless growth. By the 1980s, as many as one-third of American households did not have a second job. Today