The Fifties

...The villains, after all, turn out to be the usual suspects—conformity and capitalism...

...Did anyone ever seriously think "Ozzie and Harriet," "Leave it to Beaver," and "Father Knows Best" represented reality...

...He seems sympathetic enough with the literature and the music ofprotest, but has nothing to say, not even a question to raise, about the spread of ideas about group socialization and the therapeutic role the schools should play...

...In the end, The Fifties shares with the weekly newsmagazines a pretension to depth that barely disguises its superficiality...

...The consumer economy was turning out an abundance of home appliances, and the new medium of television was beginning to market and sell them...

...The nation was ready for witch hunts...

...the U-2 photo reconnaissance flights and the Soviet propaganda victory in launching Sputnik...

...Best-selling journalist David Halberstam puts on display all the tumult of the decade: It saw Eastern liberal internationalists and Midwestern conservative isolationists battle over the direction of the Republican Party, and Senator McCarthy's exploitation of the growing fear of Communist subversion...

...Even what Halberstam considers the watershed event of the decade—Brown v. Board of Education, and the beginning of the end of segregation in the South—could not have had the influence it did without television...

...Perhaps if such intellectuals had been quicker to recognize the evils of the far left and the not entirely spurious dangers of domestic subversion the job would not have fallen to oafs like McCarthy and the loutish members of HUAC...

...But what's wrong with this picture...

...and the MacArthur-Truman showdown...

...0ne begins to suspect that, as with the pages of details about the lives of such as Grace Metalious, we are getting size at the expense of shape, that many of these potted bios serve to hide the essential thinness of the material...

...His take on American foreign policy in the fifties is that invisible administration officials under Eisenhower deceived the American press and people, acting "in a nether-world of power and secrecy" like "an imperial country" and betraying our democratic traditions...

...Halberstam has an eye for the colorful detail, and the parade of personalities keeps his narrative this side of tedium...

...Yet, Halberstam never asks why "the great American boom," as Fortune called it, should have ended in alienation and rebellion on the part of so many of the young...

...And although The Feminine Mystique was not published until early in the sixties, Halberstam can't resist noting that Betty Friedan was already at work on her "seminal book" cataloguing the complaints of desperate unfulfilled housewives isolated in their suburban prisons...

...A large-scale transformation, but Halberstam is content to sum up the decade as "a mean time...

...Halberstam refers to "America's obsession with the Cold War," as though it were some kind of pathology...

...policy in Latin America is represented as entirely dictated by the government's "partner in the area, United Fruit" in collusion with gangsters like Meyer Lansky...

...Everything television touched would be turned into entertainment, not excluding politics...

...It sometimes seems that several different books—on the civil rights movement, on the music business, on the arms race—have been cut up and their chapters simply alternated...

...The segregationist mobs hadn't expected that their ugly confrontation with the federalized National Guard troops escorting the black children to class would be captured by camera crews and broadcast all over the country...

...Quoted in passing, and uncritically, about various matters are such authorities as Harrison Salisbury, Reinhold Niebuhr, Victor...

...As one who was there, I don't remember it quite like that...

...Halberstam sees Nixon's Checkers speech as a triumph for "the new electronic man in the new electronic age...

...Blacks from the rural South began to migrate to northern inner cities...

...To many of the media's gatekeepers, the only good thing about the fifties was that they led to the sixties.We are left with the promise that the New Left would spring up "to protest the bigness and indifference of American life...

...There is little real connection made between these various aspects of the fifties and little about them that one could not have read—and probably did—in Time...

...the growth of the national security apparatus and the expansion of the role of the CIA in covert operations...

...At the outset of the decade America's wealth and productivity, her industrial might and seemingly endless possibilities for growth created a consumer market ofunprecedented abundance, all the more shocking for its contrast with the Depression and the War years...

...Women left the workforce to raise families, "isolated," as Halberstam ominously puts it, "in a world of other mothers, children, and station wagons...

...fl...

...the beginnings of our involvement in French Indochina and the articulation of the domino theory...

...Marilyn Monroe, Peyton Place, and Playboy announced a changing attitude toward sexuality...

...But he has added little to the received wisdom that the fifties were a shameful time of anti-Communist hysteria, in which faceless men went off on commuter trains to drudge at conformity-ridden corporate headquarters, leaving their wives at home living empty existences of anguish and frustration, all of them to be liberated by the new freedoms to come...

...There is a sense in which books like this tell us more about their own time than about their subject, and The Fifties sees its decade through the lens of present attitudes so taken for granted by the author that they pass without notice...

...Perhaps to add an illusion of depth, there are long passages on such matters as the early life of Elia Kazan, Betty Furness, Ricky Nelson, Gene Ferkauf, or Hugh Hefner and the development of the mechanical cotton picker, but these are no substitute for the kind of analysis that would do more than recount events along with the liberal take on them...

...Highways crisscrossed what had been farmlands and opened up the new suburbs, where entrepreneurs like William Levitt took advantage of new technologies to develop low-cost mass housing for veterans' families...

...Explicit sexual material found its way into the plays of Tennessee Williams and a new sensuality was expressed by actors like Marlon Brando...

...the race for outer space...

...Navasky, John Steinbeck, Anthony Lewis—hardly a group representative of widely diverseviewpoints...

...And U.S...

...Clare Boothe Luce, hardly a radical feminist, greeted the birth control pill with the statement that "modern woman is at last free as a man is free, to dispose of her own body, to earn her living, to pursue the improvement of her mind, to try a successful career...

...You would never know from anything this book reveals that the Communists had ever been a real threat or that there was any motive for opposing them other than stupidity or malice...

...the beginnings of the Cold War and the debate over the development of the hydrogen bomb...

...the Korean War, the last conflict not shown in America's living rooms...

...They were about to be liberated by medical technology...

...Ironically, the decade would end with a coolly poised John F. Kennedy debating a tired, sweating Richard Nixon in a contest whose significance would not be lost on advisers to future candidates...

...Brando, Elvis Presley, and James Dean became the heroes of the developing rebel youth culture, misunderstood, "alienated"—and looking a lot like the juvenile delinquents who were becoming an increasing problem...

...Relieved of the hardships of the Depression and World War, a more worldly and more educated population began to remove restrictions on words and images that had formerly been banned...

...the policy of containment seguing into the arms race...

...With that peculiar combination of the naive and the doctrinaire that characterizes the leading lights of American journalism, Halberstam parrots the conventional wisdom about traditional forms of authority, about how government should operate, about who are the good guys (Martin Luther King, Adlai Stevenson, Earl Warren) and who the bad guys (John Foster Dulles, Richard Nixon, the CIA...

...All he offers instead is a rehash of the now familiar indictment of the television families portrayed on television...

...That, as Halberstam maintains, Ozzie and Harriet had been "role models" for millions of Americans looking for the American dream in the suburbs any more than Laurel and Hardy had...