Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

King began his career at the age of twenty-five, in the year that witnessed the invention of the TV dinner and the microchip, the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, and the closing of the immigration center on New York’s Ellis Island. The first news films of a hydrogen bomb test showed shirtless American engineers smoking pipes and wearing pith helmets as they adjusted the rigging for a blast far out in the Pacific Ocean. At a ceremony for the official insertion of the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, President Eisenhower commented that the American form of government makes no sense without a “deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” This statement annoyed liberal and conservative intellectuals alike, but the general public seemed to approve. A Gallup poll showed that 94 percent of Americans believed in God, 68 percent in an afterlife.