A Time of Euphoria

...Even if the author were more precise about how the sunnyside-up mood might be defined and distilled and maybe measured, this is a rather evanescent theme around which to organize a book...

...But O'Neill also ingeniously conjectures that it might have been better had the notorious Chicago Tribune headline been accurate after all: "Dewey Defeats Truman...

...Vice President Richard M. Nixon, General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy are treated here with contempt...

...It presents too many temptations to look for the dissatisfactions percolating below the surface, for the frustrated impulses that could be quelled merely a few more years...

...Victory over one form of totalitarianism in World War II could scarcely seem final when another form was so powerful and threatening, and punctured the confidence O'Neill claims was dominant in the'50s...

...For this prolific professor of history at Rutgers University has now joined those sporting newly polished "I Like Ike" buttons on their lapels...

...The Power Elite...

...This is an opinionated book...

...He is scrupulously aware of the racism and sexism that a great many Americans took for granted, and devotes separate chapters to the travail of blacks and of women...

...One of the reasons Eisenhower's second term moves O'Neill to uncork much champagne is the President's genuine desire for peace, without sacrificing American security...

...Still, in contrast to such pioneering narrative studies as Eric F. Goldman's The Crucial Decade and After (1960), O'Neill's almost equally fluent account is an interpretation—and must be gauged accordingly...

...He is wrong to rninimize its lingering impact and the violations of common sense and civil liberties that the inflation of legitimate anti-Communist concerns provoked...

...The author is thereby forced to downplay the continual pressure of the Cold War...

...The Chief Executive who had retired a year earlier came in 21 st, in a virtual dead heat with Chester Alan Arthur and the impeached Andrew Johnson...

...O'Neill writes not as a partisan of the past he is examining but as its analyst, although—as the author of the standard history of the 60s, Coming Apart —he is more interested in comparing it with what came after 1960 than what occurred before 1945...

...In sum, although American High will join Goldman's Crucial Decade as an indispensable introduction to the era, it is not without its quirks...

...The inauguration of a Republican administration would have automatically detoxified the body politic of Joe McCarthy's primitive denunciations of the New Deal and Fair Deal as "twenty years of treason...

...Erosand Civilization, The Affluent Society, and Growing Up A bsurd demonstrated the power of skeptical thinking, and have not since been surpassed...

...Martin Luther King Jr...

...It is remorselessly political, granting little attention to corporate America or to intellectual and artistic developments...

...The Organization Man...

...That is why the narrative is constantly arranged to fit the political facts of the period imposed by the conflict with Russia...

...Similarly, nostalgia for an era when "men were men, and women were women, and minorities knew their place" is carefully avoided...

...American High contains only a handful of endnotes and its white, middleclass focus is transparent, but its rather frequent generalizations about optimism and faith are not—and perhaps cannot be—substantiated...

...Works like The Lonely Crowd...

...Since O'Neill excludes sports as well, at least readers are assured they will not be subjected to one more account of Don Larsen's perfect game, orof the hula hoop fad...

...O'Neill is right to see McCarthyism as synchronous with the hot war against North Korea and China...

...But there is just one brief reference to Chief Justice Earl Warren, and the often praiseworthy decisions delivered by the Supreme Court are barely noticed...

...Yet more recently, under the influence of journalists like Murray Kempton and Garry Wills, historians have surrendered to revisionism and taken to emphasizing the effectiveness of Dwight D. Eisenhower's "hidden hand" in guiding public affairs in the'50s.Hewasneither a wimp nor corrupted by power, neither an unindicted co-conspirator nor egregiously deceitful...

...And though O'Neill expresses mild disdain for the opinions of contemporary intellectuals, it must be insisted—in a way, to the credit of so patriotic an era —that the '50s were a wonderfully fertile decade for social criticism...

...Federal authority spiked racist defiance and demagoguery at Little Rock, and the campuses were as quiet as the ghettos...

...Because he hates most television programing, hemissessomeof theimplications of its extraordinary impact on the national psyche...

...Excessive space is devoted to housing problems, and a special animus against the Luce publications cannot be suppressed...

...One could legitimately argue that the privatism of the '50s—a phenomenon the author is curiously eager to endorse, whatever the cost to the common welfare or the civic sense—was for many Americans a way offending off the distress an apparently incessant Cold War generated...

...Indeed, American High—presented as an accessible overview of the 15 years after V-J Day—is a feisty rationale for the new dress code that is today practically de rigueur among historians...

...Eisenhower was the last President to complete two terms...

...released in 1962 asked American historians to rate the performances of the Presidents...

...and Taiwan is called Formosa, not Nationalist China...

...If an author's opinions do not stem logically from a responsible handling of the evidence, they can be as superfluous as the tailfins on a '50s Cadillac...

...His thematic target is the Zeitgeist, the elusive spirit of an age whose touchstones were mostly private—the family, the neighborhood, the church, work —rather than foreign policy issues (such as the nebulous "spirit of Geneva...

...and postwar prosperity surged to unprecedented heights...

...O'Neill's text is hospitable enough to provide many examples itself—from the alienation from bourgeois respectability that made both Elvis Presley and The Catcher in the Rye popular among the young (who sometimes had a sneaking admiration for the Beats as well),to the plentiful anguished white, educated, middle-class housewives who became the suburban saboteurs of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique...

...Ike himself, it is conceded in the conclusion, "did not quite fit the American high...

...Yet so intense were the postSputnik anxieties about strategic inferiority and a "missile gap" that key figures in Ike's own Administration—to say nothing of the Democrats—did not appreciate his quest...

...That, happily, is not the case with American High...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University A celebrated poll that Arthur Schlesinger Sr...

...comes off best in the book—and rightly so...

...In putting "hysteria" in perspective, he veers instead toward a spurious euphoria, thus obscuring the emergence of a sullen and paranoid New Right that aborted the possibility of intelligent diplomatic exploitation of, for instance, the Sino-Soviet split...

...Atthecost of a couple of mild recessions, the national budget in some years was balanced or showed a surplus...

...Such distortions of political judgment, in which fears of Soviet power were pervasive, can only be accounted for in terms that O'Neill's interpretation is obliged to slight...

...and if he was first in the hearts of his country club buddies, he also warranted the confidence of the American electorate itself, according to William L. O'Neill...

...The quite favorable assessment of Harry S. Truman in American High is based entirely on his skill—especially in filling the remainder of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term—in confronting the peril of Soviet Communism...

...in seeking to impose limits upon the nation's presumption of its own omnipotence he was "out of step with America...

...But even if O'Neill is right that the placidity of the era is, by later standards, too conspicuous to discount, even if it is acknowledged that the generation of Americans being discussed earned the right to pursue happiness without institutional impediments or a guilty conscience, distortion mars an interpretation that skirts dangerously close to complacency, to homage to catatonia...

...He preserved the peace—by ending the War in Korea, by keeping GIs out of Indochina, while reducing defense spending and warning against the arms race promoted by what he called the "military-industrial complex...

...The exposition is at the center of the book and is its most dramatic feature— because unlike, say, Jeffrey Hart's earlier defense of the period, O'Neill has no conservative ideological agenda to assert...