Eddie and Katie

My sister worked at Greenwich House in the slums of New York City in the summer of 1948, and she convinced my parents to invite two “fresh air” children to live with us for a few weeks.  Fresh Air kids were children from the slums of New York City who would visit families living in the country for a couple of weeks in the summer.  Eddie and Katy O’Brien’s were ten and seven, respectively, poor like the kids on Rosendale Road, but urban poor. We had corn on the cob for our first meal.  Eddie took one look at the corn and said, "She don't eat corn. It makes her puke."

I waited with horrified expectation for my father to break into a rage.  No one ever spoke that way at the table. But my mother was charmed by Eddie’s use of an Elizabethan word, new to our family, and deflected the tension by commenting on it. I seized on this descriptive term and from then on never said "I feel sick to my stomach "but always "I might have to puke" later shortened to "I feel pukish."

I was three years older than Eddy, but he seemed permanently older than I would ever be.  He taught me to play poker and shoot craps, "Put da money on da cards," Eddie would insist.  His ruthless poker style later served me well in college, where consistent winnings increased my meager college funds.  Eddie and Katy’s poverty, their intelligence and dim prospects were simple facts of life, but when they left on a bus to return to the slums of New York City, we all felt that we were abrogating some responsibility.

On a trip to New York, my parents drove by their old address in the slums of the Lower East Side. My mother thought she saw Katie, slipping around a corner, but they never caught up with her and couldn’t be sure. For me, their short two week stay made me realize that my own good fortune was simply a twist of fate.

California

My father could not stand being in second place, a trait he passed on to me, and we were not in Rome for long.  April 23rd 1949, we packed up another house and headed south on a four-month long driving trip around the United States. My parents were looking for a place to settle where my father would go into business for himself.  At the time, it seemed like an unusual thing to do.  But it’s the quintessential American experience.  We could have been traveling in a covered wagon for four months.

Looking at the pictures of that trip today, I am struck by how formal we all looked … my father in a suit with a bow tie, a bit overweight and my mother, young and slim, in a neat blouse, pressed skirt and high heels, standing before some tourist site like Williamsburg, Virginia.

We drove along the Atlantic coast, past vast stretches of empty beaches and barrier reef islands that by the end of the Century would be packed with resorts and summer homes.  It was beautiful country, but my parents quickly agreed they could never live in the South because of its rigid racial segregation.  I recall staring out closed windows at the poor black shacks we passed in the woods just outside picture perfect villages of whites.  Racism was still ingrained in American life, north and south, in 1949.  At a WMCA camp on Lake George where my parents sent me for several summers, the campfire songs included many racial slurs

“Young folks, old folks, everybody come
Join the Darky Sunday school and have a lot of fun
Please check your chewing gum and razors at the door
And you’ll hear some Bible stories that you never heard before.”

There were no boys of color at the camp, which drew mainly on New York City kids. My father, a rare Roosevelt Democrat in corporate America, believed in the rights of African Americans his whole life.  But my father still talked about being “free, white and twenty-one” and on occasion warned that there could be “a nigger in the woodpile.”  

I should add that my WMCA camp was as misogynistic as it was racist.  We also sang lots of songs that put down women:

Jill was a girl of very great beauty
Who lived in a house of ill repute,
She said to the Lord I do repent
But it’s still gonna cost you about seventy-five cents.

Or

You can throw a silver dollar down on the ground
And it’ll roll, roll, roll because its round, round, round,
And as a silver dollar goes from hand to hand
So a woman goes from man to man.
And how she loves it …
A woman goes from man to man.

In the South, however, racism was in your face.  In Texas we stumbled into a highway roadhouse looking for a cool drink after an interminable stretch along a hot Texas highway at a time when cars had no air conditioning.  A prominent sign hung over the bar. 

My father turned around and we all walked out.  Years later I learned that the sign had been distributed by the Texas Restaurant Association. 

Sounds of Silence

My years in California did not begin well. The kids at Garfield Junior High were a new species, although I would soon learn the truism that California is America’s future.  They were simply further along the road to becoming consumers than suburban kids in the East.  My California peers had been taught to call everything by its brand name and they found my use of generic words a source of continual amusement. My “sneakers” were their “Keds.” My “jeans” were their “Levis.”

Adolescents were just beginning to be seen as a marketable group, encouraged to buy their own clothes, cosmetics, and attend their own movies and concerts.

Television emerged as the primary form of entertainment in the early Fifties.  My parents got a set later than most in 1953.  By the end of the decade, everyone had a TV.  Its aggressive advertising and white bread programming gave us role models, told us who we were supposed to be.  Uprooted from traditional environments, living in anonymous suburban developments or urban slums, many Americans no longer had any idea what they were supposed to be.  We knew we were in a titanic struggle with communism, and we needed a perfect image of ourselves to prove our superiority.  Anything that made us look bad or even different had to be suppressed. Most people tried to conform.

Fear of Communism and fear of the atomic bomb shifted the mood of the country from post war optimism to anxiety.  When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, anxiety turned to fear and for some to near panic.  The Truman administration released Duck and Cover, a film to teach schoolchildren how to react to an atomic bomb attack.  A cartoon turtle, cheerful theme song and advice were supposed to reassure children.  They didn’t show it at Berkeley High.  We were not required to duck under our desks and cover our heads.  But we heard about children who had nightmares after watching little Johnny dive off his bicycle and roll into a gutter.  It made war more real but surviving seemed absurd to most of us.  We joked about bending over and kissing our asses good-by.

There was no organized resistance to either the anti-Communist crusade or the manufacture and testing of atomic weapons.  Public, organized opposition would come later in the decade. (A few old peace groups survived, like the War Resisters League, but I never heard anything about them in the early Fifties.)                                                                                   

My parents started out living cheaply in a duplex on Oxford Street in Berkeley.  Within a year, my father had established a successful, if not flourishing, business and we moved into a house in the Berkeley Hills.  By then my mother had gone back to work, finding a job as the secretary to the Dean of Students at the University of California, a job she would hold through the demonstrations of the 1960’s. 

Class and race segregated the students at Garfield Junior and Berkeley High School. Areas of campus were staked out for different cliques and beware the student who ignored the territorial rules.  High school students were cliquish and mean spirited, gaining status in small groups by excluding others.  Dress codes enforced the caste system. Cashmere sweaters dominated the top (jocks and rich kids) and kakis and neat shirts with sleeveless sweaters for others on the college track. Working class kids and some crossovers wore Levi’s. They were made in San Francisco in those days and, for me at least, were redolent with the aura of the old west, of freedom and the open trail. In those days rich kids didn’t wear Levis.

Berkeley High had over two thousand students.  Rules were strict.  Sit up straight.  No slouching.  Be respectful of elders.  No shoving in hallways.  Adolescents were just beginning to be seen as a marketable group, encouraged to think independently so they would buy their own style clothes, cosmetics, and attend their own movies and concerts.  Kids were still supposed to be young adults or grown children.  The news media was not yet talking about “juvenile delinquency.”

Forty percent of the students were black, but I only met one African American … a woman … in any of my classes.  I was a good student by this time.  All you had to do was tell the teachers what they wanted to hear even if it didn’t make any sense. Only in one Civics class did I challenged “Manifest Destiny” as the god given right of white Europeans to exterminate Native Americans and expand across the Pacific.  I received my only “C.”

An English teacher, Jack Barnes, was my most subversive influence. He was a gay man in the 1950s when homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name”  (that’s from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas published in 1896, but quoted frequently in the Fifties).  Jack knew full well how hypocritical the dominant culture could be. Jack and his partner became close friends with my parents and visited them for years, for the rest of their lives.

Barnes introduced me to the books of several banned writers. Howard Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine inspired me with its passionate commitment to the common man and our revolutionary troops at their darkest moments. Barnes told me Fast had to publish his novel Spartacus in 1950 with his own money. Nobody would touch it after FBI agents told publishers that J. Edgar Hoover didn’t want the book to appear. Alfred Knopf, our most distinguished publisher at the time, sent the manuscript back unopened.  Knopf told friends he refused to look at the book of “a traitor.”

Gary Cooper won a 1951 Oscar for his performance as the isolated sheriff in High Noon, the only man in town who would do the right thing.  I hated that movie with its smug assumption that most people were cowards, but it sticks with me as an appropriate metaphor for the early 1950s.

 Paul Simon summed it up ten years later in Sounds of Silence.

People talking without speaking 
People hearing without listening 
People writing songs that voices never shared 
No one dared 
Disturb the sound of silence.

Anti-Communism

The Eisenhower years may be remembered fondly by some Americans, but for my family they were the most depressing years of since the end of the war. The Anti-Communist Crusade was at its peak, aimed not at the miniscule and dwindling American Communist Party, but at any thinking American who questioned the primacy of business and perfection of American life.  It was part of the Republican strategy to regain control of America.  The New Deal had empowered labor and its intellectual allies. Anti-communism was the tool the Republicans used to weaken labor and destroy its intellectual allies.

In my freshman year in high school, the Republican Election Committee authorized Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy to give a virulent anti-communist speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, beginning a drive that would provide the nickname for that era, McCarthyism.

Events that year confirmed the anti-communists’ worst fears.  A Soviet spy ring was uncovered in Great Britain.  Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were tried, convicted and sentenced to death for stealing and passing on the secrete of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.  The severe penalty convinced many Americans of their guilt.  My parents did not doubt Julius’ guilt, but they doubted Ethel was involved and felt bad for their two children. . (With the release of previously secret documents in July of 2015, it turned out they were probably right; Ethel was not involved.)

My parents recognized the appeal to a mean-spirited, “known-nothing,” anti-intellectual streak in the American character.  “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” my father quoted Samuel Johnson.  But events reinforced American fears.  On June 25th, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the border into South Korea and Truman declared war.  The Soviet Union announced the development of its own atomic bomb. 

McCarthy explained that the times were perilous “because of traitorous actions by those who have been treated so well by this nation.”  The speech, and the crusade as a whole  was a classic American populist movement with a mean streak. “The bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst … In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with communists.”  Most dangerous of all was Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was that “pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent.”[1] 

Some of the most virulent anti-communists had been progressive intellectuals.  Like the German intellectuals my great grandfather left behind when he fled Germany in 1848, they had lost their dreams for a better world and were now settling for the security of an all-powerful marriage between business and government. 

I read George Orwell’s 1984, which had come out in 1949.  It was a compelling depiction of a totalitarian Communist regime.  My father’s political optimism had dwindled to cautious wait and see. The air was filled with fear. Labor movements, workers rights, retirement benefits, educational opportunities, equality for women and minorities, world peace … if you believed in any of these things, or had joined a movement that fought for them, you were a communist dupe. In one of the characteristic phrases of the time, if you had fought in Spain in 1936 against fascism, you were “a premature anti-fascist,” which was as bad as being a communist. 

Life Magazine, one of the most powerful mass media instruments of the time, ran a 2 page spread in April of 1949, which featured 50 passport sized photographs – Dorothy Parker, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Albert Einstein, Charles Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marlon Brando, Henry Wallace – 50 people, all accused of “toying with Communism.”[2]

It’s an astounding list!  They represent the majority of America’s intellectual elite … scientists, clergymen, authors, classical musicians, congressmen, playwrights, labor leaders.  Many of them were heroes to my parents and the very authors I was reading in school.

Life Magazine later published an enthusiastic picture story about a high school student in Orange County who secretly taped one of his teachers making anti-American remarks and sent them into the FBI. A textbook called Exploring American History, co-authored by a Yale historian, told students, “The FBI urges Americans to report directly to its offices any suspicions they may have about Communist activity on the part of their fellow Americans.  …  When Americans handle their suspicions in this way, rather than by gossip and publicity, they are acting in line with American traditions.”

Former Nazis were being rehabilitated and praised as Western cultural icons in the fight against communism. German conductors Kurt Furtwangler and Herbert von Karajan became famous after the war despite being Nazi Party members as early as 1933.  Von Karajan had opened every concert during the Nazi era with the Horst Wessel song. 

Elizabeth Swartzkopf, a famous soprano, gave concerts for the Waffen SS on the Eastern front and starred in Goebbels propaganda films.[3] Verner von Braun, a Nazi scientist who had used slave labor to manufacture the V-2’ rockets that attacked London, was put in charge of the America’s missile program. 

Russians had been our allies in the war.  Now they were the enemy, and the Japanese and Germans were our allies.  Good guys had become bad guys and visa versa so quickly that adolescents my age were morally shell shocked.  Playwright Arthur Miller later wrote that “this wrenching shift, this ripping off of Good and Evil labels from one nation to another, had done something to wither the very notion of a world even theoretically moral.  If last month’s friend could so quickly become this month’s enemy, what depth of reality could good and evil have?”[4]

My parent’s were stunned by the viciousness of Richard Nixon’s campaign against Democrat incumbent Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas in California in 1950.  Nixon accused Douglas of being the conduit through which decisions made by Josef Stalin in the Kremlin flowed to the United States Congress.  Nixon won. 

That summer the United States was back at war, this time in Korea, although the authorities called it a “police action.” Many Americans cheered because we were finally doing something to get back at the commies, but for those of us young enough to face the draft one day, all we felt was a profound insecurity. We were stunned. “Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war … the peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline,” is the way John Clellon Holmes put it.[5]  Before the Korean War was over, 37,000 American boys … brothers, sons, and fathers … would die.

Playwright Arthur Miller commented in 1996 that the early 1950s are “an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly.”   It is difficult to recall how dark those times were.  Miller continues, “I remember those years … but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn’t travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth.”  The truth, most people believed that those accused of communist affiliations “must have done something.”[6]  

[1] Goldman p. 142.

[2] Saunders p. 52.

[3] Saunders p. 15.

[4] Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life, 1987.

[5] This is the Beat Generation (1952 for the NYT, quoted in Charters, p. 223-4.)

[6] A Rock of the Modern Age, Arthur Miller Is Everywhere, By Mel Gussow Nov. 30, 1996

Eisenhower Years

The 1952 presidential election between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson deepened the gloom in my family, although on the surface the campaign was strangely polite.  Neither candidate directly attacked the other. Eisenhower had commanded Allied forces in Europe and Stevenson was loath to attack a war hero. Stevenson, former governor of Illinois, could not be accused of the shortcomings of the Truman Administration. Ike promised, as a general, to end the war of Korea.  Stevenson pointed to the prosperous economy and promised to keep it going. 

Other Republicans, however, attacked Stevenson and everything he and his party stood for as being soft on communism and a bunch of “eggheads” out of touch with ordinary American people. The anti-intellectualism of the Republican attack was reinforced by a new element that Eisenhower introduced into American politics – television and radio image ad campaigns – the selling of politicians like corn flakes. 

During World War II, Eisenhower had worked with a man named C.D. Jackson, a driving force in the Psychological Warfare Division, at his headquarters in Europe.  Jackson advised Ike to hire a public relations firm during his election campaign, a move that infuriated my father who had hated advertising ever since his short stint on Madison Avenue in 1947 when he was appalled by the creative energy and money put into convincing people to buy things they didn’t need or really want.   It was a viewpoint shared by many liberals who distrusted advertising, leading one writer to quip, “Philip Morris, Lucky Strike, Aka-Seltzer, I Like Ike.”[1]

Ike won the presidency by a landslide and the unfinished agenda of the New Deal stopped dead in its tracks. He appointed eight millionaires to his first cabinet. One of them, the President of General Motors, famously confided to a Senate committee‚ “For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.”[2]

However, like most people in the Fifties, Ike accepted the reforms the New Deal had already solidified. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history,” Ike warned.[3]

Eisenhower’s contribution to the conservative cause was none the less substantial. He helped reshape American culture. “I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spirituall,” he confided to the evangelical preacher Billy Graham. “We need a spiritual renewal.” Suddenly, there were prayer meetings everywhere. Ike changed the pledge of allegiance to include the words “under god” and “In God we trust” was added to postage stamps in 1954 and put on paper money the next year. It was under Ike that Americans began to believe, incorrectly, that we had always been a Christian nation.[4]

Our return to religion was no accident. According to Kevin Kruse in his book One nation under God, decades before Eisenhower and inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase “freedom under God.” As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most‚ not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as “Christian libertarianism.”

The religious gambit worked. Kruse writes that church membership remained fairly constant in the early twentieth century, barely rising from 43 percent in 1910 to 49 percent in 1940. The decade and a half after the Second World War, however, saw a significant surge: the percentage claiming a church membership climbed to 57 percent in 1950 and then spiked to an all-time high of 69 percent at the end of the decade.

Encourage faith, discourage reason. Eisenhower also stepped up the expulsion of thinking progressives and liberals from public life. Within a year, USIA missions in Europe were ordered to remove books by Jean Paul Sartre, Dashiel Hammett, Langston Hughes, Howard Fast, W.E.B. DuBois, Maksim Gorky, John Reed, Agnes Smedley, Herman Melville, and all books illustrated by Rockwell Kent.[5]

Similar purges were going on in broadcast and the movies.  NBC took Dashiel Hammett’s The Adventures of Sam Spade off the air.  Hammet, Having fought for America in two world wars, died in poverty in 1961.

Dashiel Hammet’s Continental Op was 190 pounds, tough as nails, cynical about people’s motives, and didn’t mind killing for a good cause throughout the twenties, thirties and early forties … cleaning up corrupt towns and getting the bad guys.  By the 1950’s, his books were largely forgotten and Micky Spillane was number one on the best seller lists. 

Spillain’s hero, Mike Hammer, was equally tough. cynical and willing to kill, but for a different cause as he explains to a friend.  “I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands.  I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it …. They were Commies, Lee.  They were red sons-of-bitches who should have died long ago … They never thought that there were people like me in this country.  They figured us all to be soft as horse manure and just as stupid.”[6]

With the exception of the Rosenbergs this talk of killing was mainly hyperbole.  But it was a common theme.  During the anti-communist hearings in Hollywood actor Adolph Manjou famously said, “If I thought the communists were going to take over here, I’d move to Texas, because I think the Texans would kill them on sight.” As laughter broke out Manjou took a deep drag on the cigarette in his long, elegant holder. 

The Hollywood Ten, movie makers who had refused to cooperate with the anti-communists, went to jail and controversial themes were dropped from Hollywood movies.  Gentleman’s Agreement, a powerful and disturbing film on anti-semitism in the United States was replaced by Pillow Talk. The pro Russian films we had watched during World War II were replaced by equally unconvincing anti-communist films.  I was a Communist for the FBI with Matt Svetic and My Son John.  At the same time Hollywood started turning out pro-German films that glamorized the Nazi generals of World War II, The Desert Fox in 1952 and The Sea Chase in 1955.

It was easy to become cynical. My father told me two friends of his were fired from General Electric after being caught price-fixing. I said I felt sorry for them.  My father replied, “Oh don’t worry about those boys, they’ll get offered even better jobs. They know how to get the job done.” And they soon had contracts with Shell Oil at substantial raises.

[1] Saunders p. 147.

[2] What's Good For Our Country Was Good For General Motors, Dan Pontefract, Contributor, CEO, Author, Keynote Speaker, Leadership Strategist, Poet, Nov 26, 2018.

[3] Eisenhower in a letter to his brother.

[4] One Nation Under God, How Corporate America Invented Christian America, By Kevin Krause, 2015.

[5] Saunders p. 193

[6] Goldman p.212 Spillain 1951 thriller, One Lonely Night.

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