Aging & Wisdom Quote by B. Carroll Reece

Reece’s line is a tidy piece of political grief-work: it mourns a loss, assigns blame without naming names, and turns nostalgia into a program. “In this era” is doing the heavy lifting. It frames the present not as a normal cycle of change but as a distinct moral climate, almost a weather system, in which character itself is under pressure. That move is strategic for a mid-century politician: it lets him criticize modernity while sounding measured, not reactionary.

“Old-fashioned virtues” is an elastic phrase, useful precisely because it’s vague. It can mean thrift, restraint, religious observance, respect for authority, sexual propriety, civic duty, anti-communism, small-town norms - whatever the audience is anxious about losing. By refusing specificity, Reece invites listeners to supply their own disappearing ideal and then feel personally recruited to defend it. The real target is less individual misbehavior than cultural permission: virtues aren’t merely neglected; they are “increasingly unpopular,” suggesting a society that now treats decency as naive and self-control as passé.

Context sharpens the edge. Reece’s career spans the New Deal’s expansion of federal power, World War II’s mass mobilization, and the early Cold War’s fear of ideological drift. In that landscape, “virtue” becomes a proxy for political order - a way to argue that social change (and the policies enabling it) carries moral costs. The sentence flatters the speaker as a custodian of standards and casts opponents as agents of decline, all while giving the audience the warm, clarifying sensation that their unease is righteousness.