The Fifties

by David Halberstam

He seemed to be saying that the horror of modern Nazism could not be blamed merely on an odd combination of circumstances: frenzied nationalism, the post–World War One depression, and the complete collapse of existing values and German currency and the social anarchy that followed. By his lights, the excesses of Germany were the excesses of capitalism. He saw Germany as the prototype for the modern corporate garrison state. The only thing that might stop it, he wrote, was the powerful force of organized labor. Not everyone agreed: Some thought that labor was just as readily seduced by exaggerated nationalism as any other class. (Some fifteen years later, one of his political descendants in the New Left, Abbie Hoffman, was told to work on organizing blue-collar workers. “Organize the workers?” he exclaimed. “The workers want to beat the shit out of me!”)