The Fifties

by David Halberstam

of alienation; it simply meant a different kind of alienation. 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. This new threat to the human spirit came not from poverty but from affluence, bigness, and corporate indifference from bland jobs through which the corporation subtly and often unconsciously subdued and corrupted the human spirit. As they moved into white-collar jobs, more and more people felt as Sloan Wilson had when he portrayed Tom Rath—that they had less control over their lives. Here was a world where individuality seemed to be threatened and the price of success might well be ever greater conformity. Much of the old left’s agenda had been imported from Europe and had been shaped by historical and social circumstances, which did not necessarily fit the postwar American condition, where workers had become consumers and beneficiaries of the economic system and thought of themselves as capitalists. As that happened, not only did more working people enter the middle class, but there was a vast new reevaluation of what being on the left meant. By the mid-fifties one of the great new growth industries in Wall Street wa...