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As such he was disrespectful of both the very charisma that enabled him to succeed so easily and of those upon whom it worked so readily. He was like a beautiful girl who wants to be known for her intelligence but instead is known for her looks.
Stella Adler once said of him, “Marlon never really had to learn to act. He knew. Right from the start he was a universal actor. Nothing human was foreign to him.” Indeed, she later said of him, “I taught him nothing. I opened up possibilities of thinking, feeling, experience, and I opened these doors, he walked right through.
As a result of his work, Kinsey was both fascinated and troubled by the vast difference between American sexual behavior the society wanted to believe existed and American sexual practices as they actually existed; in other words it was one thing to do it, but it was quite another thing to admit doing it. For example, at least 80 percent of successful businessmen, his interviews had shown, had had extramarital affairs. “God,” he noted. “What a gap between social front and reality!”
By 1913, her marriage was beginning to break up. She wanted to put theory into practice regarding greater sexual freedom, but Bill Sanger did not. She increasingly began to regard him as a bore and even suggested that he take a mistress. He was appalled. “I am an anarchist, true, but I am also a monogamist. And if that makes me a conservative, then I am a conservative.”
By 1914, Sanger started her own newspaper, The Woman Rebel. “No Gods, No Masters,” announced the masthead.
Previously, progesterone had been obtained only in minute amounts from animal sources and, as a result, was fabulously expensive—too expensive, in fact, to be wasted on humans; it was used exclusively to improve fertility in world-class racehorses.
One night during the mid-fifties, the writer Jack Kerouac and a friend got drunk and drafted a message to the President: “Dear Eisenhower, We love you—You’re the great white father. We’d like to fuck you.”
That someone who so easily could have been a jock chose instead to belong to the world of poets and writers was thrilling to Ginsberg, who was instantly smitten. Kerouac’s first impression of the young Ginsberg was of “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out, seventeen years old, burning black eyes ...” Somewhat to the surprise of both, they became friends.
Burroughs came from a prominent family—his grandfather had invented the adding machine—and he had graduated from Harvard in 1936. But propelled by his own deep alienation and his homosexuality, he had resorted to a kind of subterranean life of mental hospitals, prison, and a drug habit. The others thought him rich because he received a $200-a-month allowance from his family, on the condition that he go regularly to a psychiatrist.
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac decided, was “a big seeker of souls and searcher through cities. I think Kerouac said ‘the last of the Faustian men.’”
They were, even by the usual standard of restless young men, exceptionally self-absorbed: They recorded their thoughts, dreams, and emotions meticulously, as if they were the first who had ever had them. As such, there is a remarkable record of those days. Kerouac was among the most prolix, writing his books in manic all-night sessions on reams of paper borrowed from a wire-service teletype machine. Truman Capote later said of him that he did not so much write as type.
They spoke of a New Vision, an idea taken from Yeats, of a society of artist-citizens, in which they would be the leaders.
They were fascinated also by urban black culture, and they appropriated phrases from it: dig and cool and man and split. They saw themselves as white bopsters. They believed that blacks were somehow freer, less burdened by the restraints of straight America, and they sought to emulate this aspect of the black condition. An interest in African-American music of the time—the new sounds of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and others now seen as legends among jazz musicians—was almost a passport into Beat society.
Cassady was to Kerouac what Kerouac was to others: someone who had escaped the shackles of middle-class America.
So it was that on October 13, 1955 Allen Ginsberg gave his historic reading of “Howl” at Gallery Six, a converted auto repair shop. The first line, now one of the most famous in American poetry, was a veritable Beat anthem: “I saw the best minds of my generation/destroyed by madness/starving, mystical, naked,/who dragged themselves thru the angry streets at/dawn looking for a negro fix ...” Ginsberg was dazzling as a performer that night. Kerouac was in the audience, with a bottle of jug wine, cheering Ginsberg on, shouting, “Go, go,” throughout the evening.
If Nixon set out to be the man who redefined the Republican political center in the post–New Deal, post–Fair Deal age, he did not, nor did any other young Republican politician, dare campaign by suggesting a return to the America that had existed before the New Deal. The phrase “creeping socialism” was about as close as they got to attacking the New Deal on its domestic reforms. Rather, the catchphrases were about a need to return to Americanism. It was better to attack Communism and speak of domestic treason than it was to be specific about reversing the economic redistribution of the New
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They were like millions of other couples, trying new jobs in new cities and finding out that they were as able as the people who had always been in charge of things in the past.
Oppenheimer had, in his own mind at least, exaggerated his role in the making of the atomic bomb and, correspondingly, exaggerated his guilt, seeing himself as, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Death the destroyer of worlds. Von Neumann agreed. “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin,” von Neumann liked to tell Ulam.
In the late forties and fifties, there would be considerable political benefit in going after the radical left, but when Hoover began in the twenties, he was led by pure instinct, for he did not like people who were different, people who opposed the values in which he believed, people whose names were different. Intellectually, it was as if he was a survivor of a simpler America that existed mostly in myth; Richard Gid Powers has described Hoover’s ethos as “a turn-of-the-century vision of America as a small community of like-minded neighbors proud of their achievements, resentful of
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If Hoover ever calls you in, dress like a dandy, carry a notebook, and write in it furiously whenever Hoover opens his mouth.
Since making the first successful oil strike in Iran in 1909, the British had taken Iranian oil as if it were theirs. In the years after World War Two, they had treated with great contempt the repeated pleas and protests from Iranian officials to make the relationship more equitable; inevitably they became the unwitting architects of a rising Iranian nationalism, which began to surface in the late forties and early fifties.
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.
Fassett, who was also from the South, wondered aloud to his boss if a dissent on this issue had any real purpose and whether it might damage the Court as an institution. He also spoke deftly to his superior about the importance of this case to America’s role in a divided world, with the Communists on one side and with much of the world’s population being nonwhite.
The Brown v. Board of Education decision not only legally ended segregation, it deprived segregationist practices of their moral legitimacy as well. It was therefore perhaps the single most important moment in the decade, the moment that separated the old order from the new and helped create the tumultuous era just arriving.
In Los Angeles, the rest of the campaign party was placed in the Ambassador Hotel’s best rooms, but he was given a virtual closet, obviously reserved for chauffeurs and servants of guests; in San Francisco, hotel security men, watching him leave for dinner with a group of Republican co-workers, decided that Morrow had snuck a white woman into his room, and literally smashed open his door at 3 A.M. to uncover the evidence—only to find him sleeping alone. In Salt Lake City, a young white woman running the elevator again and again refused to let him on.
Then he looked at Morrow and asked if it was true that his father was a minister. Yes, said Morrow. His father as well as his grandfather. “Does he ever talk to you about forgiveness?” Ike asked. Yes, Morrow answered. Often. “Well, that’s what I’m doing now,” Dwight Eisenhower said. Then the candidate talked about his own prejudice toward black soldiers early in his career. It was rooted in an assignment right after his graduation from West Point, when he had been in charge of a black Illinois National Guard unit. Poorly trained, poorly educated, often led by second-rate white officers, they
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“We’ve sued Milam a couple of times for debt. He’s bootlegged all his life. He comes from a big, mean, overbearing family. Got a chip on his shoulder. That’s how he got that battlefield promotion in Europe; he likes to kill folks. [But] hell, we’ve got to have our Milams to fight our wars and keep the niggahs in line.”
The lawyers had cooperated, Breland told Huie, because they wanted the rest of the country to know that integration was not going to work: “The whites own all the property in Tallahatchie County. We don’t need the niggers no more. And there ain’t gonna be no integration. There ain’t gonna be no nigger votin’. And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it, the better.”
There were no surprises in the story they told Huie: Moses Wright had produced Till. Milam had shined his flashlight in Till’s eyes. “You the nigger who did the talking?” he asked. “Yeah,” Till answered. “Don’t say ‘Yeah’ to me: I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on,” Milam had said. Then they drove away with Till. They told Huie they did not intend to kill Till, they wanted merely to scare him and teach him a lesson. But when he proved to be unrepentant, only then, much to their sorrow, did they realize that they had to kill him. “What else could we do?” Milam explained to Huie. “He
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They decided to kill the boy and throw the body in the Tallahatchie River. What Milam needed most was a weight. There was a cotton gin nearby where they had just brought in some new equipment, and he remembered some workers carrying out the old gin fan, about three feet long: the perfect anchor. They drove over to the cotton gin and found the fan. By then it was daylight and Milam boasted to Huie, for the first time, that he was a little nervous. “Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan,” he said. Then he and Bryant took Till to a deserted bank of the Tallahatchie. Milam made
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The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of murdering him became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what had happened.
Sheriffs were rewarded for their stewardship: It was one of the highest paid jobs in the state, the salary coming from a percentage of the ad valorem tax and, also, payoffs from bootleggers (Mississippi was ostensibly a dry state). A Delta sheriff could officially make as much as forty to fifty thousand dollars in those days, and he could make almost as much again by permitting a certain amount of bootlegging and gambling.
As far as he was concerned, Strider told reporters, the entire case was rigged. Probably, it was all set up by the NAACP. Emmett Till was not dead, he said; rather, he had been whisked out of the county by the NAACP. Not only was he sheriff, he was a key witness for the defense. On the stand he testified that he could not identify the body because it had deteriorated so badly. Of course, he had done none of the elementary police work that would confirm whether or not it was Till’s body.
If the dramatic and historic process of ending legal segregation was by journalistic definitions a major story, the migration of poor rural blacks from the rural South to the urban North, which was taking place at the same time, was not. Journalists, as the noted New York Times columnist James Reston once noted, do a better job covering revolution than they do evolution.
America prided itself that it was not a colonial power, but, in fact, our colonialism was unofficial, practiced upon powerless black people who lived within our borders.
Cotton farming was, he liked to muse when he reached the age of seventy, a bad business but a good life.
Bo Diddley, the great black rocker, was more philosophical. Someone later asked Diddley if he thought Presley had copied his style. “If he copied me, I don’t care—more power to him,” Diddley said. “I’m not starving.”
Certainly, whites had traditionally exploited the work of black musicians, taking their music, softening and sweetening it and making it theirs. The trade phrase for that was “covering” a black record. It was thievery in broad daylight, but black musicians had no power to protect themselves or their music.
The problem was that filter cigarettes were regarded at the time as effeminate. Real men didn’t smoke filter cigarettes and didn’t worry about lung cancer.
Everyone belonged to the political and economic center, and no one doubted that American values worked and that anyone with even an iota of common sense would want to admire them. In that sense the family sitcoms reflected—and reinforced—much of the social conformity of the period. There was no divorce. There was no serious sickness, particularly mental illness. Families liked each other, and they tolerated each other’s idiosyncracies. Dads were good dads whose worst sin was that they did not know their way around the house and could not find common household objects or that they were prone to
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None of the dads hated what they did, though it was often unclear what they actually did. Whatever it was, it was respectable and valuable; it was white-collar and it allowed them to live in the suburbs (the networks were well aware of modern demographics) and not to worry very much about money. Money was never discussed, and the dark shadow of poverty never fell over their homes, but no one made too much or they might lose their connection with the pleasantly comfortable middle-class families who watched the show and who were considered the best consumers in the country.
The process was the reverse of what it was supposed to be: Ostensibly, a young man would work hard to gain some measure of success; the better he did, the more secure he and his family should have been. Instead, the higher you went, the more people there were who were after your job—so work became more stressful.
Alienation, Mills and others were suggesting, could be just as powerful in a comfortable white-collar existence as it was in a harsh working-class one. The battlefield was shifting: Instead of criticizing capitalism for its failures, a new kind of left, far more idiosyncratic and less predictable, was essentially criticizing America for its successes, or at least for the downside of its successes.
By the mid-fifties one of the great new growth industries in Wall Street was investing the pension funds of labor unions. Those who had been a critical part of the left in the past were now being incorporated into the system, not merely politically but economically; as that happened, a new left was beginning to form around very different issues.
If nothing else, Mills helped reinvigorate the left, which was in decline after the war. Victory in World War Two, the growing awareness of Stalin’s crimes, and the success of postwar capitalism had brought much of the intelligentsia back to the liberal center because fascist Germany and the Communist Soviet Union were so much worse than the United States. Other intellectuals found that America, in comparison with the rest of the world, now seemed less flawed; but Mills was not interested in a comparison with the rest of the world. He was a home-grown radical, bristling with his own native
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The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism’s success in becoming the official language for all public statement.”
As the bus driver continued to shout at her, Parks thought to herself, how odd it was that you go through life making things comfortable for white people yet they don’t even treat you like a human being.
Six years later, at the time of Rosa Parks’s protest, Mrs. Robinson had become president of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of black professional women. Her group had only recently won a major victory, entitling black customers to have the titles Mr., Mrs., or Miss used with their names when they received their bills from downtown white merchants.
A few months before Rosa Parks made her stand, a fifteen-year-old black girl had refused to give up her seat to a white and had been dragged from the bus (“She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” T. J. Ward, the arresting policeman, had noted with some surprise during the local court proceedings on her arrest). She had been charged with assault and battery for resisting arrest. For a time the black leadership thought of making hers the constitutional test case it sought, but backed off when someone learned that she was pregnant.
Ed Nixon got up and began to taunt them. “How in hell are you going to have protest meetings without letting the white folks know?” he began. Then he reminded them that those being hurt were the black women of the city, the most powerless of the powerless, the domestics who went off every day to work for whites. These were the people who suffered the greatest pain from segregation and made up the core of every black church in town. “Let me tell you gentlemen one thing. You ministers have lived off the sweat of these washwomen all these years and you have never done anything for them,” he said.
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