WE WERE THERE
NYE, RUSSEL B.
We Were There The Crucial Decade: America 1945-1955, by Eric F. Goldman. Knopf. 295 pp. $4. Reviewed by Russel B. Nye ERIC GOLDMAN'S book immediately recalls the work of the late Frederick Lewis...
...So in 1952 they chose as a leader a likeable, uncomplicated man who saw things as simply as the people wished them to be...
...This is Goldman's point, that the zigzag uncertainty of the period has settled into equilibrium...
...We all remember with vivid clarity Alger Hiss, Jackie Robinson's first game, MacArthur's return, the craze for Toynbee and Mickey Spillane, South Pacific, chlorophyll toothpaste...
...Goldman writes well, even brilliantly at times...
...Puzzled and frightened the people lashed out at whatever and whomever they could...
...The war was won, peace was here, one could relax, things were gong to be all right—and suddenly they weren't...
...We swung from the decision to enter Korea, a noble act unparalleled in our history, to a bitter repudiation of all that the act stood for, a repudiation that did neither the nation nor some of its leaders credit...
...The U.N., whose organization was greeted with hope by the majority of Americans, was subjected before the decade was half over to scoffings of "globaloney...
...the assumption of the old isolationism that international problems have a quick, unilateral solution rapidly faded...
...He can snap a quotation dead on the bullseye and he had the journalist's flair, as well as a solid historical sense...
...The events of his narrative flash by at blinding speed—a sudden peace, an uneasy recovery, the opening of the atomic age, the Korean tragedy, the MacArthur affair, the Hiss trial, the Kefauver investigations, the casti-gation of Truman and Acheson, the emergence of Eisenhower, the McCarthy troubles, and so on, in a blur of recollection...
...Whereas Allen found real joy in recalling the dear daffy days before the '29 crash, Goldman, one feels, finds little pleasure in reciting what many of us would like to forget...
...There is a basic continuity in the era, as he analyzes it, despite its turbulence and confusion...
...And we swung back...
...This is what the author does in this book, a hard job, for the record is clear in our memory and the footnotes are ourselves...
...Life was too complicated and too swift for the nation to comprehend, and people wanted a simpler, more comfortable way of living without crises and involvement...
...The nation swung from the Marshall Plan to jibes at "do-gooders," from the internationalism of the forties to the "conspiracy" theory of the McCarthys and MacArthurs...
...In 1945 the nation was caught off guard...
...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye ERIC GOLDMAN'S book immediately recalls the work of the late Frederick Lewis Allen, whose studies of the twenties and thirties were masterpieces of their kind...
...The "equilibrium of a vague moderation," in Goldman's opinion, is the note on which the crucial decade closes...
...The decade 1945-55 was most certainly the crucial decade he labels it, but unlike the twenties, it was an unpleasant, bitter decade, full of wrangling, frustration, fear, and meanness...
...The difficulty is that the past ten years, as Goldman points out, were tremendously swift-moving ones, years when men and society were "hurtling through a process that recurs not in centuries but in milleniums...
...The social progress of the preceding quarter century was accepted, not rejected...
...At the close of the decade the American public for the first time was fully conscious of the fact that the life of the Vietnamese peasant, the Egyptian nationalist, or the Italian factory worker impinged directly on his...
...It is a little startling to realize that these things are history and that historians (brave ones, that is) may try to find in them a pattern and perspective quite as legitimately as in the age of Jackson or Wilson...
...So is Goldman's...
...It was a decade of wild swings, of rushings this way and that, of smug complacency mixed with sudden alarms...
...The experiences of the crucial decade, he concludes, have better prepared them for what the rest of the fifties and the sixties may bring...
...At the conclusion of his account he finds grounds for reassurance and pride in his story of the past ten years, for in the long run, he feels, the American people met their problems squarely and "reacted with good sense, not without courage and generosity...
Vol. 20 • November 1956 • No. 11
