The Society of Cynics
Topics: the status quo; free enterprise; alienation; conformity; Berkeley High; processed foods; Marlon Brando; The Wild One.
The status quo was holy grail in the early Nineteen Fifties. Everything had to be perfect. We even had a song about it, to the tune of God Bless America.
Long Live free enterprise, system divine
Come beside us and guide us,
Just as long as the profits are mine.
Good old Wall Street, may she flourish,
Corporations may they grow
God bless free enterprise, the status quo
God bless free enterprise, the status quo.
All you had to do was conform. Don’t rock the boat. The opposite side of conformity was alienation; if you didn’t conform you were alienated. The popular press blamed alienation on everything that bothered us, from juvenile crime and bored housewives to fungible white-collar workers. Television portrayed an idealized, white picket fence life we were all supposed to be living and most people pretended it was real! But it was all sustained by hypocrisy, the world that J. D. Salinger captured in Catcher in the Rye, which came out in 1951. Everybody was a “phony.”
Sociologist David Riesman wrote about alienation in The Lonely Crowd (1950) and C. Wright Mills offered his bleak view of the middle class in White Collar in 1951. Most of the critiques would come later in the decade, the faceless corporate man in Sloan Wilson’s best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Vance Packard’s diatribe on our susceptibility to advertising The Hidden Persuaders (1957), William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956). All worth reading for a better understanding of the Fifties.
Most of the students at Berkeley High were blindly jingoistic. America was the greatest country in the world. It could do no wrong. Any criticism played into the commies’s hands.
Berkeley High was much larger than Garfield Junior High, about 2000 students in 1950, and there were more kids who didn’t buy it. Some of us formed a “Society of Cynics,” a secret membership organization. We posted notes to students and faculty members who offended our sense of truth telling. Outraged by some forgotten steps taken by Berkeley High’s administration, we hung branches from the outside wall of the new auditorium, a feat that required mountain climbing gear and skills. The next day, school officials lined up the entire student body and demanded a confession or a stoolie, but we were too small a group to be penetrated. Everyone remained silent to the fury of the principal.
I flirted with religion in my junior year and briefly considered becoming a Unitarian minister. But after a crisis in faith when I suddenly doubted if God existed, I confronted my minister, Reverend Cope, and was told that not believing in God wouldn’t be an impediment to becoming a Unitarian minister. “Many Unitarians don’t believe in God, Christopher,” he explained in a trembling voice. It seemed a waste of time after that. But I took something with me from the Unitarians that has shaped my life. “I believe in the inalienable right and duty of every man to follow the truth, wheresoever it may lead him.” That’s the first principle in John Ballantyne defining 1916 book, The Beliefs of a Unitarian. It was consistent with the heroes in the books I read.
I worked, first as a paperboy at 15 and then as an assistant to a portrait photographer from sixteen through high school. Berkeley High excused me from school at 1:00 pm every afternoon. I worked 28 hours a week. Jobs were plentiful, and a high school student could make $1.25 an hour in those days or $5 in a half day. A popular book of the time explained how to travel through Europe for $5.00 a day. I made enough money to maintain a car, buy my own clothes and take skiing and camping trips. Best of all, I avoided most of high school.
In hindsight much of what I find unpleasant about the 21st Century began in the 1950s. The onslaught of processed foods: prepared cake mixes, processed cheese slices, Minute Rice and frozen fish sticks all by 1952. The first fast food restaurant chains that opened in mid-decade. Clothing with trade names proudly displayed. Cheap chain motels. Suburbs. Traffic. Strip malls. By the end of the decade American Express, Dinners Club and Bank America introduced credit cards, encouraging us to go into debt to promote consumption.
I graduated in 1953. That summer’s most popular movie was The Wild One. Marlon Brando played the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang. An incident in California where a gang actually took over a small town and frightened its citizens inspired the Hollywood film. In the movie version, however, the gang isn’t at all threatening. Gang members are neat, shorthaired, and clean cut compared to the motorcycle gangs that appeared during the Vietnam War.
One of the town girls asks Brando what he’s rebelling against. Brando famously replies, “What have you got?” Brando was not trying to change the system, simply to live as his own person within its narrow confines. The rebellion of The Wild One was not political. Brando, like many of us, was simply alienated.
Sex in the Fifties
“Sex in the Fifties” is almost an oxymoron. It was a twisted sex of raging hormones and rigid codes. People could tell if you masturbated by looking into your eyes and it was shameful even to be suspected of such a crime against decency. We loved the girls “A Bushel and Peck,” because we were “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (the titles of two 1951 popular songs), but the title of another song summed up what boys really wanted, “She Was the Rovin’ Kind.” That tension between idealizing women and looking for a playmate, characterized the larger hypocrisy of the times. . It’s no accident that Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine became so popular after it was launched in 1953
Eventually I found a cool girl who became a close friend, and we played around a lot but never went “all the way.” “Getting to third base but never making it to “home,” in the vernacular of the times. But that may have been my own prudery. Other friends of mine claimed to have “scored.” The hesitation wasn’t moral. It was entirely practical. There were no birth control pills, no IUDs, no sex education courses. My parents never told me anything about sex. Condoms were hidden behind drug store counters patrolled by unsympathetic pharmacists. Abortions were illegal and stories of coat hanger operations gone wrong were common. Sex was still what T.S. Eliot in The Wastelands called, “a moment’s surrender that an age of prudence can never retract.” The risks were very high. Most of us waited … but only for a year a two after high school. By then we were having unprotected sex with the consequences of unhappy marriages, unwanted children and back-alley abort
Didi was cool. She once struck a victory for social equality when she voted to disband a snobbish social club she belonged to with just the necessary quorum of close friends.
I found what sexual satisfaction I could sneaking off to the El Rey Theater on San Pablo Boulevard in Oakland, one of the last remaining twenty-five or so burlesque houses in the United States. I found a lot more than sex … a generally amused, not hypocritical, if somewhat jaded, view at the world, which fit me to a tee. Tempest Storm was the featured headliner whenever she was in town, but I remember a blond woman named Dixie Evans, a regular, who started dancing at the El Rey in 1952.
There is nothing like burlesque today, which in the early Fifties, at least at the El Rey, was skits and jokes interspersed with strip teases, and the women (like my girlfriend) never went “all the way.” Pasties and “G” strings were about as far as they got, except for the rare moment when Dixie got “carried away.” The top banana was featured on the posters along with the strippers. He usually had a second who played the drums and sometimes a piano and the dancers joined in the skits. Performances began and ended with drum rolls and bad jokes.
An Injured Man crosses stage on crutches.
Comic: What happened to you?
Injured Man: I was living the life of Riley.
Comic: And?
Injured Man: Riley came home!
Drum: da da boom.
The skits were takeoffs on contemporary events, usually “burlesques” of some popular movie. All the great comics of that era started in Burlesque Houses in the early to mid Fifties when Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce were doing stand up comic routines in burlesque houses and strip joints in LA. The low life was the last stand for an honest recognition of humanity’s sexuality and a willingness to poke holes in the balloon of the Fifties’ pretentious denial, to shout that the emperor had no clothes. I never saw great comic talent like Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce at the El Rey.
Dixie Evan was twenty-six years old, a well-proportioned woman with a shock of blond hair and full lips painted bright red. She would soon be dubbed “the Marilyn Monroe of stripping.” Dixie would emerge wearing a floor length red dress, a lighted cigarette in a long holder in her mouth and a come-hither smile on her lips, cradling a black cat held lovingly against her breasts. Keep in mind that just a couple of moments before this, Dixie had been on stage, dressed as a naïve farm girl, holding a pitchfork, as the top banana, dressed as a preacher, approached her.
Preacher: Do you believe in the hereafter?
Dixie: Certainly, I do!
Preacher: (Leering and grabbing his crotch) Then you know what I'm here after.
Drum: da da boom.
Dixie would stroke the cat’s back luxuriously and ask in a stage whisper, “Want to see my pussy?” The audience went wild. I never took my friends nor told them about my interest in “the low life.” It was in the nature of the times to be circumspect.
Years later I learned that Russ Meyer made his first film French Peep Show at the El Rey in the mid Fifties with Tempest Storm. Live burlesque disappeared entirely in the Sixties and the El Rey switched to "adults only" films, finally closing in the 1970's when it was demolished to make way for a freeway overpass.
Low life reflected an honesty about pain and pleasure so piercing it could anesthetize. It was no accident that the greatest theaters were located in the twilight zone between respectability and sin, or that bohemians, writers, artists and intellectuals found their real welcome among society’s outcasts. This is where all the great comics and many of its writers and poets nurtured their early careers in the Fifties..
Wilderness
What saved me during those teenage years was the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada, at a time when small glaciers still clung to highest peaks. Two of my close friends in the Society of Cynics and I spent a month each summer back packing and rock climbing, and winters skiing in the Sierra.
I still have my 1951 editions, of Walter Starr’s 1934 Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region and A Climber’s Guide to the High Sierra, which were republished by the Sierra Club in 1951, when I was sixteen.
The only available camping equipment was World War II army surplus, sold from stores run by veterans amused that we would voluntarily put on their cruel pack frames and heavy canvas sacks. In 1952 we came across the first real alternative to the GI knapsack. A backpacker in Glendale, California named Dick Kelty welded together an aluminum frame and hung straps and a canvas sack on it. He made 29 of them in 1952 and Doug and I each got one. Kelley welded them himself and his wife sewed the adjustable shoulder straps and web backing. The Kelty frame began a revolution in backpacking.
For our tents, before the era of high-tech fabrics, we bought exotic Egyptian cotton, woven light and fine. The cotton fibers would swell and keep the rain out. It worked until you touched the fiber, in which case the water flooded through as if through a hole. We became adept at designing gear and using sewing machines to make our own sleeping bags stuffed with high quality goose down. We were obsessive about weight, counting out five sheets of toilet paper for each person each day and drilling holes in our toothbrush handles.
On our first trip to the Sierra in 1951 when I was 16, my parents drove Doug Strong, Dink Leigh and me up to Tuolumne Meadows in late July We followed Lyle Creek up the canyon to Mt. Lyle, watching the water turn milky from the grinding of the glacier that still clung to Mt Lyle’s northern slopes.
In the years that followed, we preferred the most rugged part of the Sierra, the northern watershed of the Kings River. We accessed it through Parcher’s Camp, at the end of a long dirt road out of Bishop. The trail started at 9,750 feet, went along the East side of South Lake and then climbed steeply about a thousand feet into a basin of lakes shut in by towering granite walls. A few day hikers or over-nighters would come this far to fish, but few made the steep climb up a scree slope of endless switchbacks to the 12,000 foot low point between Mt Agassiz (13,882) and the sheer towers of North Palisade (14,254).
It took two brutal trips of six hours each carrying 60-pound packs to get us into the high country with all our food and gear. I learned to put one foot in front of the other and concentrate only on one step at time. If I thought of what lay ahead or behind, I wanted to rest. Once I sat down to rest, it was almost impossible to get up again. Your whole body cried out against it. Better to take one even tiny step at a time. Keep going. Important life skill!
The air was rare at 11,500 feet. Snow lay deep in pockets below the granite summits. Few people came into the high country above the John Muir Trail in those days, a land of dizzying heights, emptiness, a few stunted trees in small valleys, meadows and crystal-clear lakes rimmed on the North with snow. We could cast dry flies from the shallows and in an hour catch fifteen Golden Trout twelve to fourteen inches long, our dinner staple.
The sky was crystal clear at night, the moon bright and close, casting the faces of North Palisade in a pale light of mystery. Looking up, we could vaguely make out the chutes between the sheer cliffs we had climbed that day. It was almost impossible to believe that we had inched our way across them. The Sierra taught me that my body was capable of much more than my mind thought possible.
Mountain climbing in the mornings, fishing for dinner in the late afternoons, sitting around a fire at night smoking a cigarette and reading thick, dense European novels in cheap, light paperback editions. Surviving the incredible violence of a high-country thunderstorm. \Living on oatmeal and trout for a week after a bear destroyed our food cache. \The Sierra still seemed raw in the early Fifties.
Our last trip together we hiked well into the night under a brilliant full moon, above timberline over granite rocks and through lush meadows, wanting to believe that this would go on forever. We felt like young gods dancing over rocks and scampering up mountain peaks, beholden to no one but ourselves and our keen desire for adventure. I think we knew it was the end. We had begun to find plastic trash in the Sierra that would never disappear left by campers who would never return. I wrote my first published article called The Last Flower for the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1953.
Leaving High School
“You’ll remember these as the happiest days of your life, Christopher,” Mrs. Schwimley, my drama teacher, told me the day I graduated from high school in 1953. If she were correct, I thought, I’d kill myself. I think most seventeen-year-olds would have agree no matter where they graduated, unless they were the jocks and mindless pretty girls who dominated high school. My pictures reveal a serious young man, neatly groomed, short hair, clean white shirt and sweater, no external signs of rebellion or cynicism, a model for the Fifties. I was in hiding.
Eisenhower had been in office for only a few months, but you could feel the country moving to the right as big business took over the White House and the New Deal ground to a halt. “… a whole era is ended, is totally repudiated, a whole era of brains and literacy and exciting thinking,” is the way one Utah professor put it.
Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles unleashed a series of military adventures that Truman had rejected … adventures for which we are still paying a heavy price. In 1951, Iran’s democratically elected government had voted to nationalize its oil industry. Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh wanted a fair share of the country’s resources. He was typical of the era’s nationalist leaders, a European-educated lawyer whose father had been a bureaucrat.
In November of 1952, British intelligence officials approached the CIA with a plan to overthrow Mossadegh. The plan was simple. Destabilize the country, control the media, get the backing of a key general, and convince the Shah to fire Prime Minister Mossadegh. The Shah refused but his son agreed. The coup was successful. For the next twenty years the United States supported a weak and vacillating absolute dictator who committed terrible abuses against his people but who allowed Britain and the United States to control his oil until he was overthrown in 1979. The Iran we face today is entirely of our own making.
Capitalizing on its success in Iran, in 1954 the CIA overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala after he threatened to nationalize United Fruit Company holdings. Anti-communism was used to justify these illegal foreign adventures when they no longer could be denied.
The Communist Soviet Union with nuclear weapons was an adversary we needed to face, but assuming every communist was a tool of Moscow was the result of ideology not research. Most newly independent nations were secular and idealistic, led in some cases by Western educated communists dedicated to freeing their countries from colonial and semi-colonial control. Their ideals called for the equality of women, a fair chance for the poor and control of their own natural resources. But almost without exception, from the advent of the Eisenhower presidency, the United States opposed these movements with every means at its disposal.
No coherent opposition to our aggressive foreign policy existed in the United States in the wake of the Anti-Communist Crusade. Not only had progressives been expelled or frightened into silence in every opinion making institution, Eisenhower launched a counterattack against New Deal progressives. As we suspected at the time (and recent Freedom of Information Act records show), the CIA funded many formerly progressive opinion makers who became militant anti-communists as well as their think tanks, research centers and magazines. The foreign division of the National Student Association was essentially a CIA intelligence gathering operation as Karen Paget proves in her thoroughly researched book, Patriotic Betrayal.
Overthrowing foreign countries was illegal. Planting government agents in our cultural institutions was morally repugnant. Both could be maintained only by constant deception. A pattern emerged in which government could act in any illegal way it wished if the justification was opposition to communism. This policy began in 1952 under a benign, fondly remembered president who warned us about the growing power of the “military/industrial complex.” The policy has continued in the war against terrorism and may now go on forever, because terrorism can never be defeated. The dispossessed will always resist. We are now at perpetual war and there’s a lot of money to be made in the use of force to solve problems that can never be solved by force.
Shortly before my high school graduation, I received a flier from the Northern California ACLU asking for a contribution to fight attacks on freedom of speech. I vividly remember the black envelop in which it arrived with my name on it. My liberal father advised me against sending any money. “It might get your name on a list that could follow you your whole life, “ he warned.
Fifties’ Legacy
In the early Fifties a dread of nuclear annihilation fuelled by bomb testing led us to discuss seriously whether to bring children into a world doomed to nuclear destruction. Our fear of hidden enemies created by the anti-Communist Crusade turned us into nation looking for scapegoats. The early Fifties ended a brief post-war honeymoon where we reduced the military and poured money into schools and infrastructure, launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild a Europe devastated by war and encouraged Unions to protect and expand a growing Middle Class. The early Fifties changed all that.
Ellen Schrecker got it right in her essay, The Legacy of McCarthyism. “As the nation’s politics swung to the right after World War II, the federal government abandoned the unfinished agenda of the New Deal. Measures like national health insurance, a social reform embraced by the rest of the industrialized world, simply fell by the wayside.
“The left liberal political coalition that might have supported health reforms and similar projects was torn apart by the anti-Communist crusade. Moderates feared being identified with anything that seemed too radical, and people to the left of them were either unheard or under attack. McCarthyism further contributed to the attenuation of the reform impulse by helping to divert the attention of the labor movement, the strongest institution within the old New Deal coalition, from external organizing to internal politicking.”
The vast majority of Americans supported the Anti-Communist crusade or were indifferent to it. Even liberals, appalled by McCarthyism, remained optimistic about America’s future. Despite the rightward turn of government the accomplishments of the New Deal seemed permanent. Liberal economist Robert Heilbronner expressed America’s optimism in The Worldly Philosophers, published a few years later. For years it was a standard college classroom textbook. Heilbronner wrote compellingly about the lives and times of the great economic thinkers from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek at a time when capitalism was on the defensive against Communist ideals in a large part of the World.
The Worldly Philosophers reveals our sunny national consensus that American Capitalism could work. Heilbronner wrote that Marx got part of his critique of Capitalism right. It tended to brutalize workers and contained the seeds of its own destruction. But American capitalism, tempered by “the idea of democracy [and] the idea of impartial government seeking to reconcile divergent interests” … “can continue to evolve and to adapt its institutions to the never-satisfied demands of social justice.”
It must be 10:00 am on a Saturday, with husband home after shopping. All very dressed up!
By 2030 Heilbronner wrote, “The new problem of society would be not how to find leisure, but how to cope with unprecedented quantities of it.” Heilbronner confidently predicted a shrinking distance between rich and poor largely because of “a deliberate attempt to limit wealth at the top by policies of progressive taxation.” Capitalism would be managed in such a way that its benefits would provide a decent life for everyone. How incredibly naïve that sounds today, but it was our common understanding in the Fifties and well into the future.
As I headed off to college in 1953 our Country was still up for grabs.