The Haunted Fifties: 1953–1963

A Nonconformist History of Our Times #4

by I.F. Stone

In these pieces taken from the first ten years of I.F. Stone's Weekly, the muckraking journalist chronicles an era of political suppression, apathy, cold war, and the arms race.

Genres: History, Politics, Essays, American History, Nonfiction, Journalism

395 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Isidor Feinstein Stone (better known as I.F. Stone or Izzy Stone) was an American investigative journalist.

He is best remembered for his self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly, which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century."

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been taking a break from writing long reviews, but I see that there are only two other reviews of this book here, and that's unfortunate. I only stumbled across I.F. Stone (1907-1989) myself because Matt Taibbi recently won something called the I.F. Stone Award, and naturally I wondered who it was named after.

It turns out that Stone was a lifelong journalist who, upon finding himself blacklisted at the beginning of the 50s (he was elected to the New Jersey State Committee of the Socialist Party "before I was old enough to vote", as he puts it in the preface), started a newsletter called I.F. Stone's Weekly, which ran from 1953-1971, and at its peak reached 70,000 subscribers. Not bad, considering that people probably ran a certain risk just by signing up- that is my understanding of the political atmosphere at the time, anyway. The pieces collected in The Haunted Fifties actually run into the sixties, from '53-'63 to be exact, signing off with "Our Feud with Fidel", Stone's account of a trip to Cuba following the missile crisis. 

In recent years, journalists like Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, both of whom have the habit of alienating major media outlets, have adopted the straight-to-inbox newsletter model through Substack, and I think that Stone would be doing the same thing if he were around today. Like Taibbi's and Greenwald's, Stone's writing has the virtue that it couldn't have consistently pleased any one ideological faction- liberals or conservatives, communists or anticommunists. 

I imagine the New Journalists would have liked Stone (and maybe they did), but he was of an earlier generation, and his style is indicative of that. He's not a verbal grenade-thrower, and he doesn't go off on hallucinatory flights of fancy that blur the line between fiction and nonfiction; instead, his writing is sober, humane, and extremely lucid. He's fun in his own way, and he has a very dry sense of humor, but it's not especially caustic or belittling; it allows for the empathy he obviously felt for the people he wrote about, and an attendant curiosity about what caused them to believe what they did. As I read these pieces without knowing what Stone looked like, I pictured him wearing suspenders while sitting at his typewriter; I thought it was possible that he'd be wearing a fedora, and most likely smoking a pipe, but suspenders without question- his name was Isidore, after all. When you read Mailer and HST, it just feels like they were writing on cocaine or speed, and listening to the Rolling Stones. Stone was on nothing stronger than nicotine and caffeine, or at least that is the impression that I get from his writing style, and maybe a bourbon on the rocks in the evening. As for music, let's just say I've got a feeling that Elvis might have been a little too agitating to his nervous system. 

Stone most likely didn't earn a following among devoted communists, because he pointed out that the Soviet Union had become an authoritarian bureaucracy that had little to do with the ideas of universal brotherhood that had inspired Stone to become a Socialist as a young man. As he put it,

It is instructive to notice that workers may be aroused to the same kind of fury against their Socialist managers as against any capitalist oppressor. This will not surprise those of us who have been in eastern Europe and caught that aroma of ruling class complacency which the party apparatus exudes whether in Stalinist Russia or Titoist Yugoslavia. The men who devoted their lives to the emancipation of the oppressed are too often and too soon succeeded by men who now take it for granted that they shall have the Cadillacs, the dachas, the more spacious apartments...sometimes it is even the same men...the worker needs the secret ballot, the opposition party, "due process" of law and the free press fully as much under socialism as under capitalism. Otherwise he has merely changed bosses.

But Stone also didn't engender warm feelings from devoted anticommunists in America, because he pointed out that McCarthyism was madness, a mirror image of the paranoia that fueled Stalinism's purges and searches without end for "enemies of the people", or "subversives", as we called them here in the U.S.

At the end of his recent book Hate, Inc., Matt Taibbi wrote a short passage about his dad, who was also a journalist:

...the primary skill of any reporter is to break the seal of mistrust with strangers and find common ground. The great misread of 2016 doesn't happen if the bulk of campaign reporters had been as skilled at talking to people from all walks of life as my father. My old man can't stand Donald Trump, but I guarantee that if you put him in a room with a bunch of Trump voters, within ten minutes he'd have them all telling lawyer jokes or betting on who could throw a football through a tire-swing...they might not end up agreeing, but he'd hear what they said, directly, and not from some pollster's study.

Matt could easily have been talking about Stone. One of the many things I like about him is that he had his opinions, yeah, but he also went places and listened to people. Over the course of this collection, he travels to Soviet Russia, Poland, East Berlin, West Berlin, the American South during the push for integration, and Castro's Cuba. In each of these places, Stone talks to a broad range of people and tries to find out what they really think. That doesn't mean he had to agree with them or even feel sympathy, but he evidently thought it was valuable, both for himself and his readers, to understand the perspectives of others.

Sometimes I read the news and it seems as though there's no way the U.S. could ever have been as insane as it is today. Then again, I wonder how much has really changed. Now we have Q-Anon (there's a hyphen in this, right? If you are reading this, Q, please advise me), and big political rallies where no one wears a mask, and it looks like genuine, suicidal madness. On some level, you can't help thinking that people want to die. And yet, in the 50s, they had McCarthyism, and Life magazine cheerfully assuring readers that "hot tea or a solution of baking soda" was good treatment for radiation exposure. When Stone goes to Little Rock, Arkansas, he meets a Southern guy who blames integration on "Earl Warren and his beloved Communist Russia", which is hilarious, although in a way it also makes sense, since one of the legitimate Communist critiques of American society was that it was inherently racist, and Communists presumably would have favored integration. 

So conspiratorial thinking has been around forever, but Stone reminds his readers that it is very often a result of people explaining events to themselves in a way that they find acceptable. The alternative is painful. If that Southern guy relinquished his belief that Communist Russia was behind the movement for civil rights, for example, he would have had to confront the reality that there was something profoundly unjust, even evil, in the society he grew up and had a comfortable place in. He would have had to change his life. In America today, most conservatives seem to want to believe that the election was stolen from Trump somehow. By the same token, if liberals relinquished their belief that Putin is giving instructions to Trump over the phone every weekend, they would have to confront the reality that there is a lot of justified dissatisfaction out there beyond the horizon of the suburb, that their leaders have been at best indifferent to it, and that Trump cannily took advantage of it. If you were to substitute a few words, you could easily imagine Stone having written this passage sometime in the last four years:

Reactionaries always prefer to see the great convulsions of history as bedtime stories; this is comforting and absolves them of responsibility. Mr. Herbert Hoover, I am sure, still thinks he lost in 1932 because of some "subversive" plot; the apple-sellers on the corners were never really visible to his kind of eye.

Did Hillary Clinton see the apple-sellers?

*

Later, on a trip to Moscow, Stone makes a great point about Stalin's then-recent death, and Khrushchev's even more recent denunciation of Stalin's cult of personality:

...somehow [Khrushchev's] attack on Stalin has the same crass, crude air as Stalin's own attacks on his own victims. Stalin had a series of scapegoats on whom he blamed the abuses of his regime during his periodic relaxations. His successors act the same way. Their scapegoat was Beria and then Stalin himself. By blaming all the evils of the regime on the dead dictator, they may hope to increase their own popularity. But to blame the evils of Stalinism on Stalin is obviously inadequate...Stalinism was the natural fruit of the whole spirit of the Communist movement. To change it one must do more than hang Stalin in effigy, or defame him in self-serving panic, as Khrushchev is doing.

Try to imagine that your country has had a bad leader for a while. I know, it's hard on the imagination. Not nearly as bad as Stalin, but bad nevertheless. Maybe he has died, maybe he has lost an election, or maybe a revolution has forced him into exile in Russia, like ex-Manafort client Victor Yanukovich. You can burn this leader in effigy. You can denounce him in speeches, ban his books (or tweets, or social media pages), ban his party's symbol. 

But Stone points out that this just serves the same purpose as conspiratorial thinking. No matter how pathological or corrupt or incompetent the leader in question was, the strategy of blaming all the country's problems on one person, or one group that held power, tends to allow the same policies to resurface, or to continue under a different name. Just as Lenin, with his secret police, and hostility towards freedom of speech and expression, and decision to execute his predecessor, insured that Bolshevik rule was not really such a historical break from that of the Romanovs, and was more of a continuance with Russian history.

In other words, we will never escape Stalinism- or Putinism, or Erdoganism, or Trumpism, as the case may be- until we deal with the social and economic realities that accounted for their popularity in the first place. The way to defeat them is to offer a real alternative, instead of a promise to go back to the normality that, evidently, wasn't working for a great number of people.

*

The title of this book is The Haunted Fifties, but as I mentioned, the pieces stretch into the early 60s, and so the collection is more-or-less bookended by two different inaugurations: Eisenhower's and Kennedy's. I found "If Only John F. Kennedy Were in Hans Christian Andersen" (Stone really nailed his titles) particularly interesting. As I alluded to above, Stone's style isn't especially acerbic or hyperbolic. His attitude towards Kennedy, in fact, perhaps only seems subversive from the perspective of a guy in his mid-30s in the year 2020, whose parents (born 1945 and 1951, respectively) tend to think of Kennedy in hagiographic, mythological terms. Stone's attitude towards Kennedy, on the other hand, is cool, skeptical, and resistant to being seduced. He sees a smart and charismatic man whose instinct nevertheless seems to be to go with the status quo, particularly when it comes to the prevailing mindset of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation.

Mr. Kennedy gives every indication of being the greatest master of manipulative politics since FDR...it is a necessary quality, and we must be patient. But in being patient there is no need to shut our eyes to realities. Kennedy...seems to be a rather cautious perhaps even conventional man. He will grow; he reads; he can be reached; he has potentials of sympathy and of vision. But at the outset of his administration the key posts are occupied by much the same types representing much the same forces as under Mr. Eisenhower.

A few months later, in a different piece:

I regard the stories about Kennedy's agonizing over the decision to resume testing with jaundiced eye. I do not mean to imply that Kennedy may not have been agonized personally. But no one who has watched this administration can believe that any other decision was likely. It would have been too hard to explain. It would have meant a fight. It would have been too out of character. I do not mean to say that Mr. Kennedy, a clever man with clever advisers, will not find ways to do enough, or seem to do enough, about disarmament to keep the peace people happy too, along with the arms people. But that only means that Mr. Kennedy, in going with the tide, will do it cleverly.

For my money, I don't think I've ever read anything from 1961 that was so clearly about Obama. Smart guy, likable, funny, great speaker, we all enjoy his interviews, and in '08 I loved the guy, I really did. But when it came time to dealing with whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, who risked everything to tell the rest of us that our government was spying on us, or the mass murder of civilians abroad through drone warfare, what did he do? He went with the tide, in a clever way.

Since Biden will be giving an inaugural speech of his own soon, it seems right to close with this timely warning, from 1961:

In the euphoric post-inaugural atmosphere, sober reflection seems sacrilegious. Right and left, there is applause for the inaugural address. How could it please such diverse people? The secret lies both in the new president and in ourselves. The inaugural message had something in it for everybody. At one point it seemed to promise a step up in the cold war, at another an intensified search for peace. At one point there was cheer for those who want greater arms expenditures...but the very next paragraph offered cheer to the advocates of disarmament. Each of us assumes that the proposition with which we disagree was put in as eyewash for our adversaries. So wishful thinking shuts off the inner ear, and it does not register what we do not wish to hear.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This appears to be the fourth of what appears to be a seven volume reissue of much of the writing of I.F. Stone spanning the years from WWII to the end of his journalistic career. Most, like this one, are collections of his essays and articles, but his book about the Korean War also appears as a volume in the series.

I particularly enjoyed this volume as it begins the coverage of that period of history which I personally remember, albeit as a grade-schooler. The amazing thing is how much I do recall and how reading these pieces bring old experiences to mind, even matters as minor as how the front cover of the Chicago Daily News looked when it covered the story Stone is treating.

Stone is an exceptional journalist in that, unlike most of his peers, he was relatively well-educated. He also had the advantage of being his own boss for much of his career, writing for his own publication without commercial pressures.

[Nathan Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloody brilliant.

This book was on our house's main shelf for years when I was growing up, and the title alone always struck me as so tedious and dull that I didn't give it half a chance.

Last year, though, I flipped it open and felt immediately like I was in a time warp. In tone and subject matter, Stone is the clear forerunner to Hendrik Hertzberg (my favorite New Yorker political commentator), and his accounts of what was going on in 1954 (the CIA had just overthrown Mossadegh, &c.) are amazingly, frighteningly current. Scarily so.

Find it, or some other compendium of his work from that era.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stone was frequently prescient, and many of his articles about things going on in the 50s ring painfully true for today as well. We could use his reporting now.