The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Mills eventually became the critical link between the old left, Communist and Socialist, which had flourished during the Depression, and the New Left, which sprang up in the sixties to protest the blandness of American life. He found hope not in the grim rigidity and authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in Eastern Europe, but in the underdeveloped world, which had been victimized by European colonialism and American imperialism.

The combination of the grimness of Communism as it now existed in Europe and the success of American capitalism had essentially devastated the traditional left. By the mid-1950s, only J. Edgar Hoover seemed to think Marxism was a powerful force in postwar America. With the triumph of capitalism and the threat of the Cold War, traditional American politics had, if anything, narrowed; the differences between the Republican party and the Democratic party were seen as marginal by many serious social critics of the time. Yet the success of capitalism did not mean the end

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...

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!”)

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 passions and his own very rugged, very American sense of independence. 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. The liberalism of the society of abundance was “without coherent content; that in the process of its banalization, its goals have been so formalized as to provide no clear moral optic. The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism’s success in becoming the official language for all public statement.”

He published White Collar in 1951 and The Power Elite in 1956. In these books he saw the new middle class as affluent but without purpose and cut off from its Calvinist past, from taking pride in craftsmanship. In White Collar, he seemed to bemoan the decline of the rugged American individualist and the growing frustration of the new America. He viewed history as a constant collision between competing forces that vied for power.

At that moment in Montgomery, as in most deep South cities, school integration was still an abstract concept, something that had not yet happened and was not near happening. By contrast, riding a bus was the flashpoint, the center of daily, bitterly resented abuse.

For many blacks, the bus line symbolized their powerlessness: Men were powerless to protect their wives and mothers from its indignities; women were powerless to protect their children. The Montgomery bus system, with its flexible segregation line, vested all authority in the bus driver himself, which, depending on his personality and mood, allowed humiliation to be heaped upon humiliation.

He was also impressed by Reinhold Niebuhr and, more and more, by the teachings of Gandhi. Gandhi had had not merely the ability to lead but also to love, and to conquer inner darkness and rage. He felt that Niebuhr had misunderstood Gandhi’s notion of passive resistance. It was not, King wrote, nonresistance to evil but rather nonviolent resistance to evil. He was slowly finding a vision to fit the needs of his people and with which he was comfortable enough to devote his professional career.

In unity and nonviolence the blacks found new strength, particularly as the nation began to take notice. Things that had for so long terrified them—the idea of being arrested and spending the night in prison, for example—became a badge of honor. Their purpose now was greater than their terror. More, because the nation was watching, the jails were becoming safer. King was, in effect, taking a crash course in the uses of modern media and proving a fast learner. Montgomery was becoming a big story, and the longer it went on, the bigger it became. In the past it had been within the power of such

papers as the Advertiser and its afternoon twin, the far more racist Alabama Journal, either to grant or not grant coverage to black protests and to slant the coverage in terms most satisfying to the whites. The power to deny coverage was a particularly important aspect of white authority, for if coverage was denied, the blacks would feel isolated and gradually lose heart (for taking such risks without anyone knowing or caring); in addition, the whites would be able to crush any protest with far fewer witnesses and far less scrutiny. But that power deserted the local newspapers now, in no small part because the Montgomery story was too important for even the most virulently segregationist newspaper to ignore completely, affecting as it did virtually every home in the city; second, because even when the local newspapers tried to control the coverage, and at the very least minimize it, the arrival of television meant that the newspapers were no longer the only potential journalistic witnesses.

Her image was perfect for Hollywood, fighting new competition from television, which now offered free home entertainment. Hollywood was responding to the challenge by gradually allowing greater latitude in showing sexual matters on the screen.

The spectacular rise of Playboy reflected the postwar decline of Calvinism and puritanism in America, due as much as anything else to the very affluence of the society. Ordinary Americans could afford to live better than they ever had before, and they now wanted the things that had previously been the possessions of only the very wealthy; and they wanted the personal freedoms the rich had traditionally enjoyed too.

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. The new culture of consumerism told women they should be homemakers and saw them merely as potential buyers for all the new washers and dryers, freezers, floor waxers, pressure cookers, and blenders. There was in all this a retreat from the earlier part of the century. 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. The laws about married women working might have changed, but the cultural attitudes had not. The range of what women were allowed to do professionally in those days was limited, and even in those professions where they were welcome, they were put on a lower, slower track. 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. Only someone a bit off-center emotionally would stay the course. It was a vicious circle: Because young women were well aware of this situation, there was little incentive to commit an entire life to fighting it and becoming what was then perceived of as a hard and brittle career woman. (“Nearly Half the Women in Who’s Who Are Single,” went one magazine title in that period trying to warn young women of the pitfalls of careerism.) If there were short stories in womens’ magazines about career women, then it turned out they, by and large, portrayed women who were unhappy and felt themselves emotionally empty. Instead, the magazines and the new television sitcoms glorified dutiful mothers and wives.

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. Instead, she devotedly raised her family, supported her husband, kept her house spotless and efficient, got dinner ready on time, and remained attractive and optimistic; each hair was in place. According to studies, she was prettier than her mother, she was slimmer, and she even smelled better than her mother.

This was not done 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 magazines explained their new lives to them: how to live, how to dress, what to eat, why they should feel good about themselves and their husbands and their children. Their sacrifices, the women’s magazines emphasized, were not really sacrifices, they were about fulfillment. All doubts were to be conquered. 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. There was no divergence within. 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. Thanks, probably, to the drive for togetherness, the new homes all seemed to have what was called a family room. Here the family came together, ate, watched television, and possibly even talked. “When Jim comes home,” said a wife in a 1954 advertisement for prefabricated homes, “our family room seems to draw us closer

together.” And who was responsible ultimately for togetherne...

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.

Women’s magazines had a single purpose, she decided—to sell a vast array of new products to American housewives—and anything that worked against that, that cast doubt about the happiness of the housewives using such products, was not going to be printed. No one from the advertising department sat in on editorial meetings saying which articles could run and which could not, she knew, but the very purpose of the magazine was to see women first and foremost as consumers, not as people.

In the same magazines in the late thirties and forties, there had been a sense of women moving steadily into the male professional world; then women’s magazines had created a very different kind of role model, of a career woman who knew how to take care of herself and who could make it on her own.

But starting around 1949, these magazines changed dramatically. It was as if someone had thrown a giant switch. The new woman did not exist on her own. She was seen only in the light of supporting her husband and his career and taking care of the children. The more Ms. Friedan investigated, the more she found that the world created in the magazines and the television sitcoms was, for many women at least, a fantasy world. 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.

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.”

Later, any number of American conservatives raged against the Soviet successes in Eastern Europe, but for all the territory swept up by the Red Army, the Americans, by getting the German scientists, had pulled off a major coup. In 1945, the Germans were far ahead of other nations in rocket developments, the Soviets were second, with a significant pool of talent, and the Americans, having diverted much of their scientific resources to developing nuclear weapons, were a poor third. But getting von Braun and his colleagues instantly made the Americans competitive. Rocketry was his life.

Years later, when Ike gave his farewell speech warning against the power of a military-industrial complex, he was much heralded; but the truth was that such views were always the bedrock of his philosophy. He was the second President who had to make difficult choices about complex and expensive weapons systems. He worried about the potential drain on the economy, and he believed that the Joint Chiefs cared little or nothing about the dangers of inflation. 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. Hitler’s military build-up in the thirties had, because of the nature of armaments and of Germany’s physical location, been self-evident, but the Soviet Union was something else. It was both secretive and vast; much of its territory had no possibility of being inspected; it was a veritable black hole for the new uncertain world power across the Atlantic that felt so threatened. We had made our great investment in SAC, the bomber attack fleet that was on constant alert, but the men around Eisenhower still feared a surprise Soviet attack.

But the younger men in the administration—Nixon, Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller—understood immediately the propaganda value of Sputnik. They knew that in the age of atomic weapons, any kind of scientific breakthrough on the part of the Soviets was seen as a threat.

For a profound metamorphosis was taking place in America’s largest and biggest industrial companies: the rise of financial experts over product men. It was a sure sign that these companies, unconsciously at least, believed that they were de facto monopolies and faced no real competitive challenges anymore. Rather, their only real concern was to maximize the profits that now seemed to be permanently theirs and to drive the stock up. Bunkie Knudsen did not understand all of the ramifications of this, but he knew that something was terribly wrong. What begot greater performance on Wall Street did not necessarily mean greater performance in terms of autos; what was good for Wall Street was not, regrettably, always good for General Motors. When the meetings with Donner were over, Bunkie Knudsen could not go off and have lunch with any of his colleagues. Instead, he would go down to the Detroit Athletic Club and work out furiously to burn off his anger. Knudsen couldn’t have seen it then, but the issue he was so upset about was nothing less than the entire purpose of American industry, whether it was to make the best product possible or whether it was merely to make the maximum profit possible each year. The two, it turned out, were not mutually compatible—not by a long shot. All of this placed the corporation in jeopardy.

Some commentators wrote of the quiz shows as the end of American innocence. Starting with World War Two, they said, America had been on the right side: Its politicians and generals did not lie, and the Americans had trusted what was written in their newspapers and, later, broadcast over the airwaves. That it all ended abruptly because one unusually attractive young man was caught up in something seedy and outside his control was dubious.

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.

These younger men, most of whom had fought in World War Two, and who had in some way been broadened by that experience, did not welcome integration, Ashmore thought. Most of them, in fact, probably preferred things the way they were. But unlike their parents, they were not violently opposed to integration. It was not as emotional an issue with them as it had once been. They were businessmen first and foremost, and they understood that the world had changed and that to fight to maintain white supremacy would be self-defeating—it was probably a lost cause. They accepted the idea of “social justice”—that is, a fairer legal and political deal for blacks—but they remained wary of what they considered “social equality”—which implied an integrated dance at a country club, for instance. That went against everything in their upbringing. At the heart of their position was a desire to do business as usual and an acceptance that when it came to the crunch, the presence of a white redneck mob in the street was a greater threat to tranquility and daily commerce than was the integration of a school system or other public facilities. Thus they accepted the law of the land because they saw it, in long-range business terms, as the path of least resistance.

With television every bit of action, Chancellor decided, seemed larger, more immediate; the action seemed to be moving at an ever faster rate.

In a way, everyone seemed to have gotten something out of Little Rock. The civil rights leaders learned how to challenge the forces of segregation in front of the modern media, most notably television cameras. The networks, new and unsure of their role, had found a running story composed of almost nothing but images, which would not only prove compelling to viewers but which would legitimize its early reporters for their courage and decency (just as the broadcasts of Ed Murrow and his CBS colleagues had been legitimized radio during World War Two). In the months after the quiz-show scandals rocked the networks, there was a calculated attempt to address the resulting loss of prestige by giving the news shows ever greater freedom to cover such important events as Little Rock. Not just the news shows but the networks themselves were suddenly in the business of building respectability. John Chancellor in time would go on to one of the most distinguished careers in American journalism and public life, as anchor of the Today show, as head of the Voice of America and, finally, as anchorman of the NBC news.

No one, of course, gained more than Orval Faubus. He portrayed himself as the victim of massive federal intervention, the lonely man who believed in states’ rights and the will of his own people. No longer could any good (white) citizen of Arkansas be for segregation and against Faubus. A third term, which had seemed unlikely before Little Rock, was guaranteed. With two moderate candidates running against him in 1958, he beat their combined total of votes by more than two to one. A fourth term followed. And a fifth term. And finally a sixth. On occasion there was talk of retirement, but he had, wrote the Arkansas Gazette, ridden off into more sunsets than Tom Mix. His decision to block integration set the stage for a generation of Southern politicians, most notably George Wallace, who had learned from Little Rock how to manipulate the anger within the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media. The moderate position had been badly undermined at Little Rock, and an era of confrontation was to follow, Harry Ashmore wrote prophetically in Life in 1958.

King and his people were conducting the most perilous undertaking imaginable, for they knew that the more skillfully they provoked their enemies, the more dramatic the footage they would reap, and also the more likely they were to capture the moral high ground. King was appealing to the national electorate at the expense of the regional power structure, which he considered hostile anyway. He needed some measure of white backlash, and he needed, among other things, proper villains. He wanted ordinary white people to sit in their homes and watch blacks acting with great dignity while Southern officials, moved by the need to preserve a system he hated, assaulted them. As such he was the dramatist of a national morality play: The blacks were in white hats; the whites, much to their surprise, would find themselves in the black hats. A play required good casting and Martin King soon learned to pick not just his venues carefully, but also his villains.

The timing of King’s protest was critical: 1955 and 1956 marked the years when the networks were just becoming networks in the true sense, thanks in large part to the network news shows. Along with John Kennedy, King was one of the first people who understood how to provide action for film, how, in effect, to script the story for the executive producers (so that the executive producers thought they were scripting it themselves). It was an ongoing tour de force for King: a great story, great action, constant confrontation, great film, plenty of moral and spiritual tension. There was a hypnotic effect in watching it all unfold; King treated the television reporters assigned to him well. He never wanted a confrontation that the network newsmen could not capture on film and

feed to New York, nor did he, if at all possible, want the action too late in the day that it missed the deadlines of the network news shows. So it was that the Movement began and so it was that television amplified and speeded up the process of political and social change in America. One of the most powerful currents taking place and changing in American life in this decade—taking place even as few recognized it—was the increasing impact and importance of black culture on daily American life. This was particularly true in the fifties in two areas critically important to young Americans: music and sports. In popular music the influence of black culture was profound, much to the irritation of a generation of parents of white teenagers. While Elvis was the first white country artist to use the beat, he was merely part of a larger revolution in which not only were many of the features of black music being used by white musicians, but black musicians were increasingly accepted by white audiences as well. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, and Fats Domino were now integrated into the white hit-charts. The other evolution, equally important, was taking place in sports, and it had a significant impact on the society. With the coming of television, professional sports, particularly football and basketball, had a far greater national impact than they had ever had before. What

had once happened before relatively small crowds now happened simultaneously in millions of American homes; in effect, it was going from the peri...

The CIA agents who had engineered the Guatemalan coup were now considered to be experts, though in general their knowledge of the region was marginal, few spoke Spanish, and they tended to seek out only far right-wing military men as agents.

Kennedy had been a natural on television—from the start the camera had liked him. He was attractive, he did not posture, and he was cool by instinct: Television was a cool medium—the more overheated a candidate, the less well he did on it.

That was a critical distinction, particularly for a man entering the television age, because if there was one thing the piercing eye of the television camera was able to convey to people, it was what was authentic and what was artificial.

I wanted to write a book which would not only explore what happened in the fifties, a more interesting and complicated decade than most people imagine, but in addition, to show why the sixties took place—because so many of the forces which exploded in the sixties had begun to come together in the fifties, as the pace of life in America quickened.