The Fifties

by David Halberstam

August 3, 1948, the House Committee, which included a large number of the most unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists, reactionaries, and sheer buffoons—

Nixon, rejected after his graduation from Duke Law School by all the top New York law firms,

“Three things ruin a man,” he liked to say: “power, money, and women. I never wanted power, I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”

“I was,” he later noted, “an unctuous repulsively good little boy. My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel bitter things. It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.”

As development of the hydrogen bomb proceeded, someone asked Albert Einstein, whose original equations had paved the way to the atomic age, how the Third World War would be fought. Einstein answered glumly that he had no idea what kind of weapons would be used in the Third World War, but he could assure the questioner that the war after that would be fought with stones.

McCarthy’s carnival-like four-year spree of accusations, charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness, and boozing ended his career in shame. McCarthyism crystallized and politicized the anxieties of a nation living in a dangerous new era. He took people who were at the worst guilty of political naïveté and accused them of treason. He set out to do the unthinkable, and it turned out to be surprisingly thinkable.

The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better.

Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.

General Motors dominated the market so completely that when one of its top executives, Charlie “Engine” Wilson, left GM to become Eisenhower’s defense secretary, he was widely quoted as saying that what was good for General Motors was good for the country. That is what he probably thought, but what he actually said was: “We at General Motors have always felt that what was good for the country was good for General Motors as well.”

Fearing that talented mavericks and tinkerers were being replaced by bookkeepers and bankers, Russell Leffingwell, a partner in J. P. Morgan, warned the Senate Finance Committee in 1935 that “the growth of corporate enterprise in America has been drying up individual independence and initiative. We are becoming a nation of hired men, hired by great aggregates of capital.”

His hard work became legend within the company. He remained wary of talent and education. “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence,” he liked to say. “Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a problem. Talent will not. The world is filled with unsuccessful men of talent. Education alone will not. The world is filled with educated derelicts.”

He told one reporter, “I have never worshiped money and I never worked for money. I worked for pride and accomplishment. Money can become a nuisance. It’s a hell of a lot more fun chasin’ it than gettin’ it. The fun is in the race.”

The moment Fred Allen learned of television, he hated it. He called it “a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”

The truth was the country was changing at a remarkable rate, and a generation would soon come to power whose confidence and ambition had been intensified by both World War Two and the dynamism of the postwar economy. Still, it was Dwight Eisenhower and the men of his generation who were actually running the country, and the America they governed was the one they remembered from their childhoods, during the turn of the century. Thus, while the country was exploding in terms of science, technology, and business, and had assumed a new international role as the most powerful nation on earth, the minds of the governing class were rooted in a simpler day. Many of the tensions of the era stemmed from this contradiction.

Change

Chang

John Clellon Holmes, whose first book, Go, is often called the first Beat novel.

In those early campaigns, he was, it seemed, a man who needed an enemy and who seemed almost to feel that he functioned best when the world was against him. Such men, almost surely, eventually do get the enemies they so desperately want.

Administration officials had few moral qualms either about their role or about deceiving the American press and people. They saw themselves in an apocalyptic struggle with Communism in which normal rules of fair play did not apply.

The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington—the transition from an isolationist America to America the international superpower; from Jeffersonian democracy to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. As America’s international reach and sense of obligation increased, so decreased the instinct to adhere to traditional democratic procedures among the inner circle of Washington policymakers. Our new role in the world had put us in conflict not only with the Communists but with our own traditions. What was evolving was a closed state within an open state.

His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life.

The more that white Southerners tried to suppress the Defender, the greater its legitimacy grew with blacks: They reasoned, and not wrongly, that what the white man feared so much and wanted to stop must contain the truth.

words.

worlds

Serling’s A Long Time Till Dawn was Dean’s first starring vehicle.

During that period Kazan, then at the height of his fame, was in the process of turning John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden into a film.

Suddenly, alienation was a word that was falling lightly from his own lips and those of his friends, noted the writer Richard Schickel in an essay on the importance of Marlon Brando as a cultural figure: “The Lonely Crowd was anatomized in 1950, and the fear of drifting into its clutches was lively in us. White Collar was on our brick and board bookshelves, and we saw how the eponymous object seemed to be choking the life out of earlier generations. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit stalked our nightmares and soon enough The Organization Man would join him there, though of course, even as we read about these cautionary figures, many of us were talking to corporate recruiters about entry-level emulation of them.”

Yale historian David Potter noted in his book People of Plenty

Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,

The enemy, for him and many young leftists who came after him, was the liberalism of the era, so bland and corrupting, so comfortable, that it was essentially endorsed by both major political parties. People did not have to make difficult moral choices anymore.

Mills would later say of White Collar, the first of his defining books, that it was “the story of a Texas boy who came to New York.”

He published White Collar in 1951 and The Power Elite in 1956.

David Riesman and Nathan Glazer published their important book The Lonely Crowd, about the inner-directed and the outer-directed new Americans, who increasingly seemed to take their signals, their values, and even their ambitions not from their own desires and beliefs but from a received value system around them.

His work had always been passionate, but now it was downright evangelical. Listen Yankee! was the title of his last book—on Cuba.

The

What the

cautious

caution

Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It,

The scandal illuminated some things about television in addition to its growing, addictive power: The first was the capacity of a virtual stranger, with the right manner, to project a kind of pseudo-intimacy and to become an old and trusted friend in a stunningly short time. That would have profound ramifications, as television increasingly became the prime instrument of politics. The other thing it showed, and this was to be perhaps its most powerful lesson, was that television cast everything it touched: politics, news shows, and sitcoms. The demands of entertainment and theater were at least as powerful as substance.

“I’m getting awfully sick of the lobbies by munitions,” he told the Republican leaders. Indeed, he sensed their primary motivation was greed: “You begin to see this thing isn’t wholly the defense of this country, but only more money for some who are already fatcats.”

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Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. New York: Morrow, 1990.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: NAL/Dutton, 1958.

Packard, Vance Oakely Packard. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: Pocket Books, 1981.

Ulam, S.M. Adventures of a Mathematician. New York: Scribner’s, 1976.

Van Doren, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1958.

Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955.