The 1950s and Now
Jezer, Marty
BOOKS The 1950s and Now THE DARK AGES: LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1945-1960 by Marty Je/er South End Press. 335 pp. $17.50 hardcover. $8 paperback. Memories of the 1950s have generally evoked...
...troops poured into Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia on a semipermanent basis...
...Back then Ronald Reagan was also "only acting...
...Henry Wallace and the remnants of the small but influential American Communist Party reminded the right wing that there still was a spirit of rebellion in this country...
...To his credit, he also shows what was really alive back then, what gave birth to the liberating outburst of the 1960s...
...Under cover of the "Soviet Menace," all sorts of repressive behavior were possible...
...But The Dark Ages goes much further...
...The cycle has come full turn, and a bad re-run of the 1950s is broadcast from the White House...
...Only nagging fears of newly developed atomic weaponry seemed to undercut the innocence...
...In transportation, Jezer provides an analysis of how Detroit conspired to ravage urban transit systems throughout the United States...
...Free thought in literature and the arts and the lively spirit of the generation that had fought through the Depression went down in the slaughter...
...Suddenly Bud comes downstairs...
...At home, labor unions were broken...
...Indeed, the real enemy of the postwar reactionaries was not Russia, but the spirit of the New Deal and the social advances it had made...
...With the rise of SANE, CORE, the Community for Nonviolent Action, the historiography of William Appleman Williams, and the daring anti-nuclear forays of Linus Pauling and the good ship Golden Rule, the tender shoots of a new consciousness somehow managed to survive the bleak storms of postwar reaction...
...In his account of life in the United States from 1945 to 1960, Jezer carefully documents America's transformation from a nation flush with New Deal optimism and victory over the Axis to a self-lobotomized imperial fortress so twisted with fear of "alien" ideologies that it nearly choked itself to spiritual death...
...They were only acting, they lie to their son...
...The parents, caught in the act, quickly recover their cool...
...Showing them to be sexist, racist, and repressed to the extreme, Jezer captures the essence of television sitcoms—and the mainstream 1950s culture—in a single episode of the aptly titled "Father Knows Best...
...It's another postwar reaction period, complete with Red Scare, environmental decimation, imperial paranoia, corporate hegemony, cultural numbness...
...We were so naive back then...
...Dad is yelling at Mom over her alleged inability to drive a car...
...Harvey Wasserman (Harvey Wasserman is co-author, with Norman Solomon, Robert Alvarez, and Eleanor Walters, of "Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation...
...But Marty Jezer's Dark Ages provides an explanation...
...Jezer shows how the American foreign policy apparatus became the property of a reactionary clique of wealthy Russia-haters who made over the Soviet Union in a paranoid image of the Puritan Devil...
...In writing about the 1950s Jezer has, in fact, produced a well-timed critique of much that is going on today...
...But the wild political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s shattered it all...
...The true victors in the reaction against farm radicalism were the chemical companies and agribusiness, which gobbled up the land and forced America to fill its belly on Wonder Bread and contaminated meat...
...And with the book comes a strong sense of what we are up against with the Reagan Administration, and what might be done to overcome it...
...In bebop music, beat poetry, the lives and letters of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, the Zen searchings of Gary Snyder and Alan Watts, the pioneer work of the early feminists, the brave protests of the civil rights vanguard, Jezer finds the roots of the human movements that kept alive—barely—the certainty of a brighter day...
...Through NATO, the Truman Doctrine, Korea, the H-Bomb, and brinks-manship, the postwar regimes declared permanent war against an "enemy" barely capable of feeding itself, let alone conquering the globe...
...Indeed, the sense of community and hope generated by the radicalism of the 1930s emerged from the World War II tunnel a pallid, marginal thing...
...The undertones of sexuality and democratic spiritualism, so long repressed, burst to the fore...
...In housing, beer production, atomic power, education, and diet, the same pattern of monopolization, corporati-zation, and dehumanization spread across American life...
...Bud might just as well have found them screwing on the living room floor, such is his surprise...
...The Dark Ages offers important insights not only into the 1950s, but into the current Reagan era as well—with invaluable lessons about how these gray days can be sent with their earlier counterparts into the compost heap of history...
...Howdy-Doody, Elvis Presley, and Ike fed a strong sense that the world was a simple place...
...The lack of spontaneity and grace was nowhere more evident than on television...
...In a path-breaking chapter on agriculture, Jezer illustrates the postwar decimation of the family farm and the mass introduction of chemical pesticides and herbicides which would soon lead to a global crisis...
...Memories of the 1950s have generally evoked a half-smile of late...
...The 1950s became almost an embarrassment, an incomprehensible time when the world was grainy black and white...
...All this Jezer sets out lucidly...
...Now he is President of the United States...
...The suburban myth did not sanction openly expressed anger...
...He is shocked and they are embarrassed," writes Jezer...
...Marty Jezer has tied those strains—dark and light—into a highly readable volume...
...Until now it has been hard to pinpoint exactly what it was about that era that was so unnatural, so hauntingly unfulfilled...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
