Lost in the fifties tonight

(This week will be all reprints from my blog, due to a crazy week last week. On the plus side, the foundations of our house are not about to collapse and the dogs are healthy).

I’m not sure why I reread David Halberstam’s The Fifties after 30 years but I think it holds up well (the illustrations are 1950s stuff, in case you were going to ask).

It doesn’t give me the seismic shock it did when it came out in 1993. Starting in the Reagan era, conservatives began holding up the 1950s as the moment America achieved perfection, the era we needed to go back to — a logical outcome, I guess, of the myth Reagan saved us from the 1970s nightmare. The subtext (frequently the text) of this argument was obvious — feminism and civil rights had ruined the United States! — but Halberstam shows just how far from the fantasy the 1950s really were. As he says, the 1950s we were supposed to get back to was the one in TV sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best.

Halberstam starts in the post-war 1940s: Democrats had been in power since 1932 (even some Dems thought this was becoming a problem), WW II was over and the Republicans of the Midwest were eager to return to isolationism and hunker down in their small towns, ignoring the rest of the world. Politics, as well as a genuine concern about the USSR’s ambitions, pushed us in the other direction: the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe posed a serious threat while charges of being “soft on communism” or “losing China” (i.e., China’s internal struggles had led to Mao’s communists winning out over our preferred leaders) made it toxic for politicians not to take an internationalist stance.

Fear of communist subversion remained a major factor throughout the decade’s politics, leading us into the Korean War (Truman wasn’t going to be tarred with losing Korea) and the Hollywood blacklist. After espionage gave the Russians the atomic bomb, fear of nuclear war became a thing, more so with the development of the vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb. More so again after the USSR put Sputnik, the first satellite, in orbit, demonstrating their apparent technological superiority. The Eisenhower administration knew they were, in reality, barely keeping even with us, but couldn’t announce this fact for fear of cluing in the Soviets about our espionage abilities.

This fear existed alongside all the good stuff: a booming economy, good pay and plentiful production that made it possible for millions of Americans buying their own car and suburban houses. But the seeds of the eruptions of the 1960s were already there: civil rights protests, women frustrated with second-class status, the counter-culture in the form of the Beat poets, Eisenhower putting American money and influence on the line to keep France’s colonial government in Vietnam (as the leaders of the anti-colonialist forces were communist). TV transformed everything: entertainment, politics (the book ends with the very televised 1960 presidential campaign), advertising. It also helped break Jim Crow, by showing as print media could not how brutal segregation was. Rock and roll arrived.

Even in its own decade, these issues left America feeling much less utopian than the 1980s fantasy had it. Movies such as Rebel Without a Cause questioned how happy Americans really were. The Kinsey report showed the principles of monogamy and premarital chastity were often little more than lip service. General Motors, which had been on the cutting edge of quality cars at the start of the decade, became increasingly big and sluggish and increasingly ignored engineers’ advice in favor of the money men (worrying about stock prices over all else goes back further than I realized) — an example Halberstam uses to stand in for all big business. Employees began increasingly feeling like cogs in a wheel, moving upwards in a rat race where even winning was unsatisfying.

What leaps out at me most on rereading is all the stuff Halberstam doesn’t cover. Nothing about gays or gay rights, other than mentioning some of the Beats swung that way. Polio (probably the biggest scary disease prior to AIDS) and the polio vaccine don’t come up. Censorship (movies, comics, books) doesn’t get much of a mention.  Neither does that bogeyman of the decade, juvenile delinquency. In fairness, it’s a 700-page paperback and there’s not much he could cut to make space (a few things, but not much). If flawed, it’s still a damn good job.