America 1945-55
NEVINS, ALLAN
America 1945-1955 The Crucial Decade. By Eric F Goldman. Knopf. 298 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Allan Nevins Professor of American History, Columbia University; Pulitzer Prize-winning...
...The prosperity of the farmer...
...Supported by careful research and vigorous writing, they make every page...
...at least) imagination...
...Goldman's mastery of these telling bits...
...This is a pungently vivid book, exciting for its reportage and its reportage alone...
...Ten times more art went into his selection of these bits than the ordinary reader will suppose...
...Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Writers used to assume that very recent history could not be written at all...
...But partly because the book is so good, the author's talent so vivid and keen, we do feel inclined to ask for more...
...not merely from Bernard Baruch...
...Who knows...
...These scenes are concise, quiet and without histrionics, but effective...
...The witty thrust of Stevenson's: "I would be proud to stand on that record if only the General would move over and make room for me...
...No doubt, if Mr...
...Goldman at one point quotes from the Cleveland Plain Dealer...
...But nowadays we want our pure history as well as our memoirs and biographies to come down to date...
...now they are proving that it can be the most interesting kind of history...
...James M. Byrnes and Trygve Lie but from Norman Vincent Peale, Strom Thurmond and Lauren Bacall...
...One device is the careful setting of scene after scene, the story moving swiftly through scores of dramatic episodes...
...In his preface Mr...
...Perhaps we ought not to ask for more...
...and it is a little disappointing that we do not get it...
...As the work stands, we may be grateful for its many line qualities, and each reader may hazard his own interpretation as to longtime trends...
...Rickey, I've got two cheeks...
...The full story of how Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University played the main part in setting McCarthy on his fell enterprises is one of several important novelties...
...Certainly its response to the Korean War was heartening...
...We have long had our memoir-histories served up hot from the event...
...Goldman has done even better here...
...Nixon in his well-rehearsed telecast on Pat and the little dog...
...Goldman's scheme for his book had comprehended more attention to literature, education, the churches, to cultural and spiritual values generally, this liner element in the nation's postwar development would have been better delineated...
...The advancing status of the Negro Here is just the right incident, Jackie Robinson ready to respond to the white ball player who might aim a blow at his face: "Mr...
...It puts the events of national and international politics in due proportion and proper sequence...
...In this decade the republic did assume the leadership of the free world, and faced its great responsibilities with earnestness and (until 1953...
...The book is marvelously served by Mr...
...His knack hides a great deal of hard work...
...Goldman obtained from personages of the time...
...O'Dwyer brassily answering the questions of Kefauver's subcommittee on crime...
...Despite the McCarthys and Knowlands and Nixons on the political plane, it did offer a scene of intellectual ferment and moral exploration that held much achievement and more promise...
...The demand for "perspective" is limited by two facts: First, people will not wait, and second, stable perspective is an illusion—perspectives constantly change...
...What is the long-time trend?'' Mr...
...It is to be wished that the book had made more of this thesis, and had presented a fuller analysis to sustain it...
...However familiar, they all have fresh touches: Truman telling Congress he will take over the railroads just as news comes that the strike is called off...
...MacArthur cheered by seven million New Yorkers while Senator James Duff acidly remarked that the country was "on a great emotional binge...
...the blanched Hiss confronting Chambers...
...Its electric quality, its vibrancy, derive from two main devices which the author uses with great dexterity...
...The story is delightfully readable from beginning to end...
...Clarendon began writing his History of the Rebellion in 1645, the very year of Naseby, and it lasts for the same reason that Churchill's record of the Second World War will last...
...But as he went on he gained a sense that the nation was pulling itself from its postwar sloughs, and gaining higher ground...
...At various points it offers completely new information which Mr...
...Welch denouncing McCarthy as the whole nation looks on...
...Goldman offers some encouraging words...
...The other device is Professor Goldman's telling use of the illuminating quotation, the typical incident, the unpretentious event that connotes a whole national attitude or change...
...Of course nobody knows, but we expect so alert a historian to make a guess...
...and so on to the final scene of Eisenhower telling the Russians at Geneva that he dares them to exchange blueprints and permit aerial inspections...
...What Harry Thurston Peck did so dextrously in his Twenty Years of the Republic, 1885-1905, published in 1906, Mr...
...The story of the Western wheat-grower who hands his bank $10,000 in bills to pay off an $8,000 mortgage and explains in confusion: "Oh, I must have brought the wrong bucket.'' The fact that the Eisenhower Administration calmly took over the New Deal-Fair Deal policies...
...At the beginning of his work, he writes, he was depressed by the cheaper and soggier aspects of the period: the glitter and chrome, the dissipation and selfishness, the apathy and lack of aspiration...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 50
