The Fifties. - book reviews

National Review, June 21, 1993 by Florence King

The Firties, by David Halberstam (Viilard, 800 pp., $27.50)

AS AMERICA entered the 1950s, the air was full of debates about the New World Order, except that it was called "the American Century." The phrase was coined by Henry Luce, who believed it was America's duty and destiny to spread democracy around the globe.

Opposing him was Senator Robert A. Taft, the presidential choice of conservative Republicans and isolationists. Taft warned: "We would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves during the nineteenth century."

That is precisely what we started doing in the Firties, thanks to a contradiction in the isolationist mindset that David Halberstam points out in the opening chapters of this richly enjoyable survey of the decade.

The Republican Right, he says, was isolationist when it came to the Atlantic, regarding it as the British ocean, the international ocean. But the Pacific was "the Republican ocean," obliquely associated with missionaries and docile, smiling Asians; a gin-and-tonic, white-linen-suit sort of world full of dreamy subcontinents, like the one that Senator Wherry of Nebraska called "Indigo China."

If I had total recall, my memory would consist of the contents of this book. I started the decade as a girl of 14 listening to the radio bulletin about the invasion of South Korea by North Korean troops, and ended it as a woman of 24 reading about the poisoned silver dollar carried, but not used, by U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers when he was shot down and captured by the Soviets in 1960.

Halberstam uses the same landmarks, filling in the middle with a host of engaging memory promptors. His sources are secondary and derivative, but his instinct for the revealing anecdote, his ear for the memorable quote, and his awesome powers of organization add up to a variegated overview that moves seamlessly between the serious shenanigans of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the frivolous ones of Peyton Place author Grace Metalious.

He makes Adlai Stevenson look much better like a New Democrat, in fact, or an earlier version of Sam Nunn. "The most conservative Democrat to run for President since John W. Davis," according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The media loved him nonetheless. Adlai, said Eric Sevareid in one of his trademark rolling parallelisms, "has excited the passions of the mind; he has not excited the emotions of the great bulk of half-informed voters, as had Eisenhower, who, like them, was empty of ideas or certitude."

Mordant radio wit Fred Allen called television "a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything." The first campaign ad was aired by Ike, who said: "Yes, my Mamie gets after me about the high cost of living. It's another reason why I say it's time for a change. Time to get back to an honest dollar and an honest dollars work."

When some purists objected to this "15-second spot," ad man Rosser Reeves countered that "Never have so many owed so much to so few" was also a 15-second spot. So was Marya Mannes's parody: "Eisenhower hits the spot;/One full General, that's a Iot./Feeling sluggish, feeling sick?/ Take a dose of Ike and Dick."

Halberstam traces the decline of the Detroit auto industry from 1948, when GM president Charles Wilson signed the first union agreement guaranteeing cost-of-living raises. "In effect it made the union a junior partner of the corporation, [and] reflected the absolute confidence of a bedrock conservative who saw the economic pie so large that he wanted to forgo his ideological instincts in order to start carving it up as quickly as possible."

Forced to pass along huge labor costs to consumers, Detroit depended on "planned obsolescence," annual model changes calculated to make people ashamed of "old" cars and eager to prove their status by buying a new one every year.

The 1956 VW bug ($1,280) got a rave review in Popular Mechanics and "inspired" GM's disastrous rear-engine Corvair, which Car and Driver called "one of the nastiest-handling cars ever built." (Its tires required different pressures front and back, something few Americans outside of racing buffs understood.)

The "Model T" of housing was Levittown. The first Levitt houses sold for $7,990, with no down payment, no closing costs, no secret extras, just a $100 deposit, which was returned. "It was an unusual concept: The price was the price," Halberstam notes admiringly. Levitt built 36 houses a day. So what if they didn't have basements? The ancient Romans didn't build basements, said Bill Levitt, and who was he to challenge the ancient Romans?

Levitt houses proved unusually sturdy, but the builder was savaged by culture snobs like John Keats (The Crack in the Picture Window) and Lewis Mumford, who theorized that since the houses looked alike, the people inside them must be "made from a cookie cutter." Mumford's coinage quickly spread through the redoubts of bohemianism. I remember sitting on the floor deploring conformity with a bevy of tormented intellectuals, all of us wearing black turtleneck sweaters and talking about cookie cutters.