IS EVERYBODY HAPPY?

Wechsler, James A.

One may advance a variety of diagnoses for the malaise that afflicts the politics of our time, alternately driving young men and women into the comfortable refuges of suburbia and the beatnik joints...

...At first glance they seem to add up to the conflicting propositions that things are too good and too bad, too simple and too complex, too bright and too dark...
...While Podhoretz expressed concern about the problem of "unearned maturity—a maturity that has become a means of protecting one's neat little existence from the disruptive incursions of experience," he felt obliged to add the dubious defense that "the prime virtue of a period of cold war and atomic stalemate must necessarily be prudence...
...From one viewpoint it may be said that we are the victims of an emotional crisis that has been building up since 1914, that man has never been quite the same since the blood-drenched slaughters of the early years of World War I, and that the H-bomb is the symbol of our futility...
...and America looks only for leaders who will sustain the general glow...
...Much of the same thing has been said by others, and some of those saying it most vociferously were once the angriest critics of the American scene...
...If certain inequities persist in human relations, if there remain "pockets of discontent," they are being steadily overcome by "moderate" measures...
...Yet it was less than fifteen years from the disenchantment of Herbert Croly—"the chief distinguishing aspect of the Presidential campaign of 1920," he wrote, "is the eclipse of liberalism or progressivism as an effective force in American politics"—to the birth of the New Deal...
...The "rediscovery of America" became a fashionable pursuit among intellectuals in the 1950's...
...America, we are told, is busy...
...So one buckled down to the intriguing duties and diversions of existence, presumably leaving the bomb for the adolescents to worry about...
...since it is unthinkable to contemplate "preventive war," we can do nothing more than sit around, keep our fists up, and try to concentrate on the comforts of life...
...Any militant brand of humanist liberalism is termed passe either because, as we are told by the realistic wardheeler, the average citizen is so well off that he doesn't care or, as we are told by the disaffected intellectual, so beat that he is beyond caring...
...Each in his way—Podhoretz, Bell, and Macdonald, one in his early thirties, the second nearing forty, the third in his fifties—describe a variety of political disenchantment...
...It is not enough, it seems to me, to derogate all this by regarding Jesus as a compulsive maso-chist, or charity as an expression of guilt...
...the Thirties were alternately shadowed by economic tragedy, the rise of Nazism, the victory of Fascism in Spain in what seemed like the decisive battleground of the decade, the collapse of the Russian myth in the fantasies of the Moscow trials, and the expectation of larger war...
...Finally —or finally, as of this writing—there was the ruthless Russian intervention in Hungary, where young men once again perished defying a colossus while we wrung our hands impotently and even our most reckless "libera-tionists" fled for cover...
...they are out of date...
...in either case he is in no mood for great endeavors...
...Let each man, then, cultivate his own garden in his own way, whether he believes that all is well or that all is lost...
...Obviously there are elements of validity in this idyll...
...The questions with which Macdon-ald is now confronting himself are obviously neither inconsequential nor novel...
...America is preoccupied with the reaping of its golden harvest...
...Louis' milk...
...So long as the dominant areas of the world are organized in vast super-states, whose economic base is large scale industry and whose political base is tens of millions of helpless 'citizens,' I see no hope of significant improvement...
...to the younger generation American society seems on the whole a reasonably decent environment for the intellectual . . . they discovered that 'conformity' did not necessarily mean dullness and unthinking conventionality, that, indeed, there was great beauty, profound significance in a man's struggle to achieve freedom through submission to conditions . . . "The trick, then, was to stop carping at life like a petulant adolescent...
...No iron law of history decrees that another resurgence is out of the question, or that, in Walter Lippmann's words, "whirl" is forever king...
...he detected among the young an "underlying restlessness, a feeling of being cheated out of adventure, and a search for passion...
...The view most commonly advanced by Henry Luce's publications is that America is so giddy a success story that it has rendered militant political liberalism obsolete...
...The writers of the Twenties—Dadaist, Mencken-sian, and nihilist—scorned bourgeois mores...
...The mounting traffic in tranquilizers challenged the picture of a nation enjoying its labors and resting well, even where the lawns were greenest...
...and the communiques of the day mock all our triumphs: Washington (a.p...
...Let "prudence" and "moderation" reign...
...Columnist Robert C. Ruark offers his formula for curbing juvenile delinquency: "The Mosaic law was good enough for the Biblical people and I am getting to be strictly an eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth cat myself...
...Sam Lubell, after touring the country during the 1958 elections, wrote: "One finds a deep uneasiness...
...many of its practitioners are reminiscent of the "tired radicals" of 1919 who, as Walter Weyl wrote, had once "aspired to overturn society" and ended up "fighting in a dull board of directors of a village library for the inclusion of certain books...
...That is Time's American cover story, and it has sold well...
...Meanwhile, others simply admonish us to realize that this is necessarily a time of "limited objectives": The unalterable fact of life is the Soviet threat to other nations...
...by 1948 the Communists had staged their coup in Czechoslovakia and shattered the illusions of multitudes of innocents, just as the Nazi-Soviet Pact had done in 1939...
...How do we know what's good and what's bad...
...If this sounds harsh, I quote the Bible and J. Edgar Hoover as my principal teachers...
...In any case, with certain amendments the passages might apply to a large section of young middle-class America...
...For Herblock intermittently reminds us that The Thing is ticking...
...The great battles are either over or too big for us...
...Liberalism had been thus buried before...
...In a symposium on "The Younger Generation" published by The New Leader, Norman Podhoretz saluted the new era as a time when young people learned that "the real adventure of existence was to be found not in radical politics or in Bohemia but in the 'moral life' of the individual, within the framework of his efforts to do his duty and assume his responsibilities in a world of adults...
...A study in Englewood, N.J., published in 1959, disclosed widespread family tensions induced by the pressures of "keeping up...
...the rich have learned to accommodate themselves to the realities of the welfare state...
...This is the way things will be for a long time unless they awkwardly explode in our faces...
...But, for some, such answers remain unsatisfying...
...In different tones each imparts the sense that there is little that can be done, or that would prove to be worthy of the effort...
...admittedly "one was living in a world of severely limited possibilities, balanced precariously on the edge of an apocalypse...
...A dispatch by Austin C. Wehrwein to the New York Times summarized the findings this way: Chicago, Aug...
...They found that everything from crab grass to high taxes played a role in emotional difficulties that are linked to varied diseases...
...Very much aware of how complicated and difficult all problems were, very much alive to the dangers of ideologies and enthusiasms and passions . . . they struck a perfect attitude of the civilized adult: poised, sober, judicious, prudent...
...The "beat generation" may be a fragmentary, peripheral upheaval...
...but Time's view of the nation is important if only because it is accepted by so much of the press and by so many political figures who are swayed by what they read or what is read to them...
...even the knowledge that for the first time men were fighting under the banner of the United Nations in defense of the principle of collective security against aggression, rather than as the conscripts of national states, could not dispel the gloom one felt at the awareness that "here we go again...
...It is not society that is ailing, or in the reorganization of society that we shall find any solutions...
...What is interesting is the view that they are somehow more answerable than those he defines as "The Big Ones," or that complete and total answers may be found outside the framework of politics...
...When the President embarked for Europe in August, 1959, Time affirmed that "the U.S...
...The United States may have developed a lithium bomb—a comparatively cheap method of producing a walloping hydrogen explosion .. . Meanwhile, the air is filled with jungle noises...
...On the surface this appears to be a time when any reflections related to the continuity of idealism are deemed either naive or, in the lingo of the politicians, "impractical...
...How, for example, does one define "the good life" without at least considering whether it involves a degree of social responsibility...
...Thou shalt not kill' is a good line and, if you do, the idea is that somebody ought to kill you right back as swiftly as possible and with a minimum of sentiment or excuse...
...In 1950 we were thrust overnight into a conflict in Korea, to most Americans a remote, unreal terrain...
...During the same period we have wrought wonders of material progress, and glimpsed new horizons of abundance through the prospective peaceful uses of atomic energy...
...But our possessions, our gadgets, our little victories over nature look lustreless in our hands...
...For those who clung to the vision of the perfectability of man, the disillusionment has been especially rough...
...for those who minimized the spasms of irrationality in man, the organized murder of Fascist and Communist states has been pitiless revelation...
...most of them made firm and decisive commitments to careers of a fairly modest kind, such as teaching...
...Nevertheless, there remains a special poignancy about the failure of the suburban vision...
...more meaningful is the wider withdrawal and frustration...
...it is in therapy or theology alone that we will find peace...
...what is the point of carrying banners without slogans...
...Given the history of the last forty-five years, one is almost compelled to marvel that so many men in so many places still find a common ethical language...
...Richard E. Gordon and his wife, Katherine C. Gordon, after a study of admissions to the Englewood hospital...
...the middle class is serenely clipping its coupons, and the workman is driving his Chrysler...
...It is, of course, part of the unending human self-deception to believe that a change of address may resolve all the perplexities of life, and that escape from the crowded city streets to the sunlit spaciousness of suburbia will automatically bring marital harmony and spiritual calm...
...In a sense his portrait blended two views of what is going on: the notion, on the one hand, that it is possible—economically and every other way— to "get down to the business of living" at an early age, and the conviction that it is impossible to do anything about the larger perils of the world...
...David Riesman suggested a few years ago that trouble was greatly exaggerated by men with a nostalgia for old political combats: ". . . our steadily rising productivity has made it possible for politicians to pay off their promises in jobs and coin of the realm rather than in a fanatical search for scapegoats . . . Despite the current outcry over apathy and corruption, Americans possess increasingly competent government, without having to spend much energy getting it...
...In his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Dwight Macdonald, a refugee from that political nook-and-cranny known as Trotskyism and other varieties of anti-Stalinist radicalism, summed up his own retirement from politics: "The questions that now interest me are not the 'big' ones: What to Do About Russia...
...The truth was that "in such a world there was very little one could know, very little one could do...
...Despite the spectacle of mass "settling down," the flowering of suburbia, and the statistics of economic advance, there is plainly something wrong with the highly-publicized image of American serenity...
...The notion, indeed, that all we seek in life is peace and quiet is one of the central befuddlements of our age...
...Liberalism admittedly seems defensive, sluggish, apologetic in most of the manifestations of its public spokesmen...
...7—Life in growing suburbia, specifically in Englewood, N. J., is giving people ulcers, heart attacks and other "tension-related psychosomatic disorders," according to a doctor who practices there . . . The report was made by Dr...
...Then, as now, many had "lost faith in progress, in the rationality and disinterestedness of man, and in the malleability of society," as William E. Leuchtenberg wrote in The Perils of Prosperity...
...We have much more to learn in the whole murky realm of the private personality...
...that so many have found so little satisfaction in the climax of the journey cannot be simply dismissed as proof that man cannot buy heaven on earth...
...But: ". . . the problem for the generation is less, I would argue, the 'fear of experience' than an inability to define an 'enemy.' One can have causes and passions only when one knows against whom to fight...
...For America and Britain alike, cried Life not long ago, "the abundant life is already a fact...
...These seem to me either unimportant or unanswerable...
...everything is serene in suburbia, and the world is way beyond us...
...but let it be clear that there is nothing anyone can do that matters much in a time of stalemate...
...For many this was expiation for the folly of their romance with Communism...
...That there are large flaws and self-deceptions in it will be contended later...
...that Dwight D. Eisenhower left behind him that week was one in which fear and fretting were made ridiculous by the facts of national life...
...Is World Government the Answer to the H-Bomb...
...But here, as in the economic area, the European model has been quite misleading . . ." Those who are less optimistic about our national equanimity urge that we turn fiercely upon ourselves, acknowledge that the universal condition of disorder lies within each man and that all political nostrums must fail because of the evil that lurks in each dark soul...
...But far more painful is the lot of the man we like to call "average" in a time when inflation is more and more viewed as an uncombatable malignancy...
...One may advance a variety of diagnoses for the malaise that afflicts the politics of our time, alternately driving young men and women into the comfortable refuges of suburbia and the beatnik joints of San Francisco...
...having finally recognized the nature of the beast, they could feel only uncritical passion for the girl they had left behind...
...It is not fretting over something that has already happened...
...and to get down to the business of adult living as quickly as possible...
...Reading this ode to a "non-generation," it was difficult to avoid thinking of the editor of the magazine in which it appeared—a warm, zestful, sixty-five-year-old immigrant named Sol Levitas, who has devoted most of his life to warring against oppression, injustice, and all varieties of man's inhumanities to man, and who never seems to have suffered from combat fatigue...
...that men apparently in full possession of their wits are still capable of being moved by considerations other than flagrant self-interest (unless the desire to satisfy one's own conscience may be called a form of self-gratification) or irrational sexual compulsion...
...Let the hell-raisers face it...
...liberalism needs not a program but a doctor...
...that the capacity for heroism of a freedom-fighter in Budapest or a Negro school child in Little Rock still endures as it did at Dunkirk and Madrid...
...Even in Englewood, of course, taxes and crab grass alike shadow the model home...
...This uneasiness has a curious quality...
...it became an act of positive virtue and maturity...
...To former Socialist Dan Bell, writing in the same symposium, the matter was not quite so simple...
...it is all of us who are sick, sick, sick...
...In plain talk this means, roughly, that many families are busy getting ahead...
...Since 1-914, then, we have lived through a longer than forty-five-years war, and the end is not in sight...
...Mainly, it reflects an anxiety over impending disaster, a sense that as a nation we are beset by problems which are slipping beyond our control...
...The radicals of the Thirties fought 'capitalism,' Fascism and, some, Stalinism...
...Some may choose to define this as the continuity of religious impulse and others may simply discern in it the existence of a moral realm...
...In this opulent land the New Dealer, the Fair Dealer, the Square Dealer, or by whatever name one chooses to describe the man, is a rebel without a cause...
...they do not alter the majesty of the portrait...
...The poor, we are told, are virtually no longer with us...
...they cultivated an interest in food, clothes, furniture, manners—these being elements of the 'richness' of life that the generation of the Thirties had deprived itself of...
...America is prosperous...
...The cogent fact about Englewood, the report said, was that it was a fast-growing suburb with "rapid social mobility...
...that such concepts as liberty, equality, and fraternity still have a shared meaning...
...but few are totally unaware of it, or do not at some moment in their lives identify the phenomenon...
...It has permeated the political world, coloring the attitudes and guiding the strategies of ambitious men...
...Many intellectuals and non-intellectuals feel uncomfortable in this situation and wish for parties and programs that would provide election Armageddons and 'meaningful' issues—as many once 'found such issues' by applying Marxist stereotypes to events...
...We have, of course, learned a good deal about ourselves in this century and much of the discovery is unpleasant...
...Today, intellectually, emotionally, who is the enemy that one can fight...
...the radicalism of another day is immaterial, irrelevant, and incompetent...
...Is Planning Incompatible With Capitalism...
...The voices of reassurance are similarly unconvincing...
...Granted that there remained the fact of the atomic bomb, and the nervousness it might induce...
...if the threat of annihilation hangs over the world, that is being met with resolution and fortitude by hard-headed Republican management of our destinies, in cooperation with Democratic statesmen like Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who are never to be confused with "left-wing Democrats" and other screwballs...
...one wondered whether things have gone so awry that the young have suddenly grown old while the old, refusing to fade away, momentarily halt the clock...
...And get down to business the younger generation did...
...In the same week, Newsweek, Time's competitor, reported that fifty-eight per cent of American college students had chosen Mad as their favorite magazine...
...The mistake of the Thirties had been to suppose that society could ever be more than a bad bargain with the absolute...
...These are the random disturbances of democracy...
...is the tran-quilized man the dream figure of our century, his senses sufficiently dulled to avoid pleasure, and pain, and perception alike...
...To someone like myself, born in 1915, it is hard to remember any time when reason seemed to be in the ascendancy and when we were unafnicted by existing disorder or the threat of greater catastrophe to come...
...But it has also become fashionable to cite the unrest in suburbia as evidence that all our ills are those of the mind, and that any absorption with economic pressures reflects a sort of cultural lag...
...Does America Need a Labor Party or a Revitalized Democratic Party—or just a Dozen More TVAs...
...I was not quite fourteen when the depression struck America...
...Who am I? How can I live lovingly, truthfully, pleasurably...
...One had hardly a moment to breathe between the surrender of Japan and the beginnings of the cold war...
...For many of those who have made it to the outskirts have labored long to pay for the journey...
...Podhoretz, of course, was avowedly writing of a segment of a generation, which is as much as anyone can purport to do, and primarily of those young college graduates who deemed themselves intellectuals...
...It is, for example, a truer estimate of the American condition than the one which Pravda and Izvestia normally give their readers...
...As befitted responsible adults, there was nothing playful or frisky about these young people...
...How many lost dreams are summarized in that report...
...A great many of them married early...
...Yet none of this has quite told the whole story...
...Thus the image of "settling down" ceased to portend a life of drab accommodation...
...Will There Be a Depression...
...It is the 'small' questions that now seem to me significant: What is a good life...
...Thus is Time's optimism happily blended with the dourness of more skeptical man...
...The portrait may be intermittently marred by the harassment of Negro school children in Little Rock, by recession in Detroit, by a slum fire in New York, by a school shortage in Chicago, or by the discovery of an unexpectedly high level of fallout in St...
...and perhaps it may be said that he was striving to record a mood rather than to justify it...

Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 4


 
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