The Fifties

by David Halberstam

The kindest thing that could be said for the Advertiser’s coverage of the Movement was that it was erratic and ambivalent. Hall apparently met Martin King just once, largely by accident, when Hall had escorted Peter Kihss, of The New York Times, to King’s church. The rise of King baffled him.

For the situation did not allow a man who would be a great Southern editor to sit on the sidelines: It demanded a certain moral reckoning, as the Rev. Seay had so recently prophesized.

The first story, by the city editor, Joe Azbell, was written as if merely to let the white community know what the blacks were up to. He had been tipped off by E. D. Nixon. The story ran on page one by mistake. The publisher, Richard Hudson, had called in to order the story be placed inside, but it was too late. That gaffe greatly helped the black leadership publicize the boycott at first.

But even though the two Montgomery papers were owned by the same company, they no longer had a monopoly on news. Just a year earlier, on Christmas Day 1954, WSFA-TV had gone on the air. There had been one other local channel, but it did no local programming.

Ironically, it was the white leaders of Montgomery who first helped to create the singular importance of Martin King. Convinced that ordinary black people were being tricked and manipulated, they needed a villain. If they could weaken, discredit, or scare him, then their problems would be solved, they thought. Gradually, he became the focal point of the boycott. “I have the feeling,” Bayard Rustin, the nation’s most experienced civil rights organizer, told him at the time, “that the Lord has laid his hands on you, and that is a dangerous, dangerous thing.”

The white leadership was paralyzed; in late February, it cited an obscure state law prohibiting boycotts and indicted eighty-nine leaders, including twenty-four ministers and all the drivers of the carpools. The real target, however, was King. He happened to be in Nashville lecturing when the indictments were announced. Back in Montgomery, many of the other leaders were giving themselves up in groups to show their defiance.

He brought over some of Martin’s oldest friends, including Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse, to help talk him out of returning. But Martin Luther King, Jr., was firm now. Not to return, to desert his friends at this point, would be the height of cowardice, he told them. “I have begun the struggle,” he said, “and I can’t turn back. I have reached the point of no return.” At that point his father broke down and began to sob. Benjamin Mays told him he was doing the right thing, and he returned to Montgomery. On

Supreme Court had judged the Montgomery bus-segregation law to be unconstitutional. The blacks had won. King, always aware of the need to include rather than exclude people and the need to be magnanimous in victory, spoke at a mass rally to point out this should not be viewed as victory of blacks over whites but as a victory for American justice and democracy. On December 21, the city prepared to desegregate its buses. An empty bus pulled up to a corner near Dr. King’s home. Martin Luther King, Jr., boarded it. The white driver smiled at him and said, “I believe you are Reverend King.” “Yes, I am,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said. “We are glad to have you with us this morning,” the driver said.

“The truth,” she once said, “is that I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men fool themselves. Men sometimes didn’t bother to find out who I was, and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving someone I wasn’t. When they found this out they would blame me for disillusioning them and fooling them.”

Her career was just taking off; his career (but not his fame) was to all intents and purposes finished. He saw her as a good and sweet girl and hated the idea that Hollywood perpetually cast her (to his mind) as a slut. It was to be an uneasy marriage. For their honeymoon they went to Japan, where DiMaggio was doing a celebrity tour. Her passport read Norma Jean DiMaggio.

She was sure that her career was over. But she also decided to tell the truth and to take the initiative by leaking the story herself to a friendly writer. It was her on the calendar, she said, and there was no sense lying about it. “Sure, I posed,” she said. “I was hungry.” The public rallied to support her.

Hefner had come from a financially comfortable, if emotionally arid, family. His home was largely devoid of warmth and openness, and it was against that Calvinist ethic that he would fight in the pages of Playboy. Their Christianity seemed to him a cold, emotionally sterile one, separated from all pleasures of life. His grandparents were pious Nebraska farmers, and theirs remained a God-fearing home: There was no drinking, no swearing, no smoking. Sunday was for church. Hefner’s first wife, Millie, later noted that she never saw any sign of affection or anger displayed by either of his parents.

INDIAN SUMMER IS LIKE a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor how long she will stay.” It began in prose that threatened neither John Cheever nor John O’Hara as the most famous chroniclers of American social mores.

With a few rare exceptions, she was not close to other women, and as her literary career progressed and her own life began to unravel, she wrote of the frustrations of women with less skill and perception than she had in her first book.

Up until then during this century women had made fairly constant progress in the spheres of politics, education, and employment opportunities. Much of their early struggle focused on the right of married women to work (and therefore to take jobs away from men who might be the heads of families). In the thirties a majority of states, twenty-six of forty-eight, still had laws prohibiting the employment of married women. In addition, a majority of the nation’s public schools, 43 percent of its public utilities, and 13 percent of its department stores enforced rules on not hiring of wives. A poll of both men and women in the thirties that asked “Do you approve of a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her?” showed that 82 percent of the men and women polled disapproved.

During the Depression, large numbers of women went to work because their homes needed every bit of cash they could bring home. In addition women were always welcome in those parts of industry that offered poorer-paying jobs. At the beginning of the New Deal in the garment district of New York, where traditionally workers were the wives of immigrants, women worked forty-eight hours a week for 15 cents an hour, which meant that after a long, exhausting work week they brought home $7.20.

World War Two dramatically (if only temporarily) changed how the nation regarded the employment of women. Overnight, that which had been perceived as distinctly unfeminine—holding heavy-duty industrial jobs—became a patriotic necessity. Four million additional workers were needed in industry and in the armed forces and a great many of them had to be women. The Ladies’ Home Journal even put a woman combat pilot on its cover. Suddenly, where women had not gone before they were very welcome indeed; some 8 million women entered the work force during the war. That trend came to a stunning halt in the years after the war.

Within two months after the end of the war, some 800,000 women had been fired from jobs in the aircraft industry; the same thing was happening in the auto industry and elsewhere. In the two years after the war, some 2 million women had lost their jobs. In the postwar years the sheer affluence of the country meant that many families could now live a middle-class existence on only one income. In addition, the migration to the suburbs physically separated women from the workplace.

Now, there was little encouragement for women seeking professional careers, and in fact there was a good deal of quite deliberate discouraging of it. Not only were women now reared in homes where their mothers had no careers, but male siblings were from the start put on a very different track: The boys in the family were to learn the skills critical to supporting a family, while daughters were to be educated to get married. If they went to college at all they might spend a junior year abroad studying art or literature. Upon graduation, if they still had ideas of a professional career, the real world did not give them much to be optimistic about.

Gender, not talent, was the most important qualification. Men and women who graduated at the same time from the same colleges and who had received the same grades (in many cases the women received better grades), then arrived at the same publishing or journalistic companies only to be treated very differently. Men were taken seriously. Women, by contrast, were doomed to serve as support troops. Often they worked harder and longer for less pay with lesser titles, usually with the unspoken assumption that if they were at all attractive, they would soon get married, become pregnant, and leave the company.

They also suggested that the federal government give rewards to women for each child they bore after the first. A postwar definition of femininity evolved. To be feminine, the American woman first and foremost did not work. If she did, that made her competitive with men, which made her hard and aggressive and almost surely doomed to loneliness.

In an age before the coming of midday television talk shows largely designed for housewives, womens’ magazines comprised the core reading material for the new young suburban wives. If the magazines’ staffs at the lower rungs were comprised mostly of women, the magazines were almost always edited by men; in addition, editorial content much more than in most general-circulation magazines, echoed the thrust of the advertising.

If the advertising was designed to let women know what the newest appliances were and how to use them, then the accompanying articles were designed to show they could not live up to their destinies without them.

deliberately. There were no editorial meetings where male editors sat around and killed ideas that showed the brave new suburban world as populated with a significant percentage of tense, anxious female college graduates who wondered if they were squandering the best years of their lives. But there was an instinctive bias about what women needed to hear and that it should all be upbeat, and that any larger doubts were unworthy.

The ideal fifties women were to strive for was articulated by McCall’s in 1954: togetherness. A family was as one, its ambitions were twined. The husband was designated leader and hero, out there every day braving the treacherous corporate world to win a better life for his family; the wife was his mainstay on the domestic side, duly appreciative of the immense sacrifices being made for her and her children.

A family was a single perfect universe—instead of a complicated, fragile mechanism of conflicting political and emotional pulls. Families portrayed in women’s magazines exhibited no conflicts or contradictions or unfulfilled ambitions.

“The two big steps that women must take are to help their husbands decide where they are going and use their pretty heads to help them get there,” wrote Mrs. Dale Carnegie, wife of one of the nation’s leading experts on how to be likable, in the April 1955 Better Homes and Gardens. “Let’s face it, girls. That wonderful guy in your house—and in mine—is building your house, your happiness and the opportunities that will come to your children.” Split-level houses, Mrs. Carnegie added, were fine for the family, “but there is simply no room for split-level thinking—or doing—when Mr. and Mrs. set their sights on a happy home, a host of friends and a bright future through success in HIS job.” Those women who were not happy and did not feel fulfilled were encouraged to think that the fault was theirs and that they were the exception to blissful normality.

One of the first women to challenge the fallacy of universal contentment among young suburban wives was a young woman from the heartland of the country. Born and reared in Peoria, Illinois, she did well enough in school to be admitted to an elite Eastern women’s college, one of the Seven Sister schools. She entered Smith College in 1939, finding everything that she had longed for as a small-town girl in Peoria: a world where women were rewarded for being smart and different instead of being punished for it.

Betty Goldstein worked as a reporter for a left-wing labor paper. As a journalist, she had got a reputation of knowing her way around and having lots of contacts. She became the person designated to arrange illegal abortions for involuntarily pregnant friends. This, she found, she was able to do with a few discreet phone calls.

She liked being a mother, and she liked her friends, but she missed the world of social and political involvement back in New York. She also worried that she had not lived up to her potential. By the time they were living in Rockland County, she had begun to write free-lance for various women’s magazines.

The economics of publishing were significantly different from those of magazines. Books were not dependent upon ads, they were dependent upon ideas, and the more provocative the idea, the more attention and, often, the better the sales.

Despite all the confidence and happiness among women portrayed in the magazines, there was underneath it all a crisis in the suburbs. It was the crisis of a generation of women who had left college with high idealism and who had come to feel increasingly frustrated and who had less and less a sense of self-esteem.

She had stumbled across something that a number of others, primarily psychiatrists, had noticed: a certain emotional malaise, bordering on depression, among many women of the era. One psychiatrist called it “the housewife’s syndrome,” another referred to it as “the housewife’s blight.” No one wrote about it in popular magazines, certainly not in the monthly women’s magazines.

Rock, however, was trying to use them to cure infertility in women. He believed progesterone and estrogen might stimulate the womb, and he sent one of his assistants to work with Pincus to learn from his experience in retrieving mammalian eggs. Gradually, their work brought Rock and Pincus closer together.

But the Catholic Church almost stopped the ceremony. The day before his wedding, Rock performed a cesarean section, an operation then forbidden by the Catholic Church. At confession, a local priest refused to absolve him and thus it was impossible for him to receive the sacrament of marriage. But William Cardinal O’Connell overruled the priest.

“I think it’s shocking to see the big family glorified.” When the Pill first came out, he received an angry letter from a Catholic woman who excoriated him for his role in its development. She told him, “You should be afraid to meet your maker.” “Dear Madam,” he wrote back. “In my faith we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions.” Still, Rock’s primary motivation in joining with Pincus was for the opposite problem that Pincus and his team were working to solve. He wanted to help couples who, despite all physiological evidence to the contrary, were unable to have children. In the past he had had some success injecting the women with natural progesterone.

In 1966, a year before Mrs. Sanger’s death, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, neither of whom had been helpful to her while in office, became co-chairmen of Planned Parenthood’s world-population committee.

Von Braun was not merely a brilliant rocket scientist, but a kind of space poet who envisioned manned space flights to the moon and Mars. His most practical thoughts always seemed to others like dreams and fantasies. Years later, in July 1969, on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch of a manned trip to the moon, a news conference was held at which several NASA officials answered questions. Reporters repeatedly asked the officials what the true historic significance of the moon landing was. None of the officials had an answer except von Braun. For him the moon shot was one more major step in human evolution. It was comparable, he said, to the moment when life emerged from the sea and established itself on land.

He liked to tell friends of the excitement he had felt when he looked through his first telescope and saw the moon: “It filled me with a romantic urge. Interplanetary travel! Here was a task worth dedicating one’s life to. Not just to stare through a telescope at the moon and the planets, but to soar through the heavens and actually explore the mysterious universe. I knew how Columbus had felt.”

Nonetheless, in the earlier part of the fifties, some of the doubts were still there, and when a movie was made about von Braun’s life, I Aim at the Stars, Mort Sahl, the comedian, added the line “But sometimes I hit London.” Von Braun became in time not merely an American citizen but an enthusiastic American—a fan of the barbecue, a delighted deep-sea diver, a believer in the process of democracy—who added his voice to those advancing the cause of integration in the Huntsville, Alabama, schools.

There he worked first on airplanes; only later was he transferred to another sharashka, where he could work on space. To a Westerner the anomaly of this—a man under a life sentence for treason working in a prison on the most secret scientific developments—is almost too much to comprehend. In the Soviet Union it was an accepted practice.

He spoke often in private about the danger of spending so much on weaponry and defense and in the process destroying the economy and thus weakening the country these weapons were going to protect. The federal budget, he liked to say, had risen from $4 billion a year in 1932 to $85.5 billion in 1952—with some 57 percent of that increase going to the Pentagon. “This country,” he once noted, “can choke itself to death piling up expenditures just as surely as it can defeat itself by not spending enough for protection.” Defense spending, he believed quite passionately, was dead weight; it was inflationary and subtracted from the nation’s vitality rather than added to it. The great American fear in the fifties was of Soviet intentions and capabilities. As Michael Beschloss pointed out, even the Moscow phone book was classified.

The need became obvious for some kind of new reconnaissance plane, one that would fly above Soviet air defenses. The photographic technology was already available; by the summer of 1955, the Air Force had the capacity to take a picture from 55,000 feet of Ike’s golf ball on a putting green.

Otherwise, Eisenhower was interested: Photo reconnaissance had been vital in World War Two, and he had been readily convinced of its tactical value. He was immensely frustrated by how Soviet secrecy fed anxiety in America, causing ever greater pressure on him to spend more and more on potentially useless weapons.

Even Charlie Wilson, the great doubter of all things scientific and experimental, was an enthusiast. Generally, Wilson had no interest in the new science of weaponry. He was dubious about missiles and moon shots (he did not need to know if the moon was made of cheese, he liked to say) and he was not worried, as some of the science people around Eisenhower were, about Soviet missile developments. “You’ll never convince me that the Russians are ten feet tall,” he liked to say when anyone worried aloud about Russian missile progress.

There was an ejector seat in the plane, but Powers, like the other pilots, was wary of it. It was, he wrote, like “sitting on a loaded shotgun.” Not only were the pilots uncertain the device would work as designed, they did not entirely trust their sponsors; they suspected that the CIA might have designed it to blow them up so there would be no trace in case of a mishap.

“I was able to get a look at every blade of grass in the Soviet Union,” Allen Dulles boasted later, after it was all over. But the general public did not know it. The U-2 was a classic invention of the secret government and pointed up the problems of a two-tiered government in general.

Indeed, one of the first things the U-2 proved was that there was no bomber gap, as some critics of the administration had claimed. There had been a nervousness since Russia’s Aviation Day in 1955, when a squadron of Bison bombers had flown over the parade, followed by several other squadrons. The U-2 revealed that what the Soviets had almost surely done that day was flown the same few squadrons in repeated sorties. As for the missile gap, the U-2 showed that though the Soviets were working on their missiles, they had yet to launch an ICBM.

“In retrospect,” added McDougall, “the decision seems disastrous.” Dr. Homer Stewart, the head of the committee and a physicist at Caltech, told von Braun immediately after the vote: “We have pulled a real boner.” Von Braun was absolutely appalled by the decision.

A book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It, which had appeared two years earlier to little attention, suddenly became a smash best-seller. The president of Harvard, Nathan Pusey, was moved to declare that a greater percentage of the GNP should go to education.