End of an Era
“The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.”
Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel. 1922
The Fifties had been hard on young people because they were years without hope.
A virulent anti-communist crusade had driven progressive leaders from every opinion making institution in the country, eliminating idealism from the national debate. Intelligence itself became suspect as the country turned on the “eggheads” associated with Roosevelt’s New Deal. Our new leaders told us we were in a deadly battle with an implacable enemy. Survival demanded conformity: in speech, appearance and thought.
Bombastic politicians insisted the United States was the greatest nation, nothing like us ever was. But I’d read enough history by then to know that nations and empires rose and fell, and their downfall was the result of a hubris, the insistence that they were the greatest nation and nothing like them ever was. To avoid that decline, America needed to deal with poverty, ignorance, discrimination, hatred, and violence.
I was fifteen when the decade began, old enough to watch that brief period of post war optimism slip away. Men came home in 1945 from fighting overseas and women came back from factories with the belief that their lives would be different. Common people from democracies had defeated military elites from fascist dictatorships under slogans Roosevelt articulated in “the four freedoms”: “freedom of speech and expression; the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way; freedom from want; and freedom from fear.”
This “is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” It meant “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” And freedom from fear meant “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.”
The steady erosion of Roosevelt’s dream had started with Truman’s tacit endorsement of the Anti-Communist Crusade when he instituted the first government loyalty oaths in American history. It solidified under Eisenhower, the friendly, avuncular president who helped restore religious superstition and released the Dulles Brothers to engage in reckless foreign policy adventures as they invented an intelligence agency less interested in gaining intelligence than violently intervening in other countries.
Public demonstrations had finally stopped above ground nuclear testing, but children still learned to duck under their desks and cover their heads, practicing for a nuclear war. We had all seen pictures of Hiroshima. We knew that no one would survive the much more powerful nuclear bombs, poised on the tips of inter-continental ballistic missiles.
The Fifties had been wrenching times as millions of Americans left their hometowns for better opportunities. Twenty to thirty million people tore out their roots and migrated to somewhere new, losing the continuity of extended families and nurturing communities. Most left rural towns, to move to urban centers and join a growing middle class of workers and consumers. Communities became anonymous. Doctors stopped making house visits. Traveling salesmen stopped coming to our doors. Neighbors stopped looking out for each other (or nurturing long simmering feuds), in either case a kind of connection with those around us. We were on our own now, many in shiny new, sterile suburbs. We had to fit in with those around us or we were alienated or reported to the police.
By the end of the decade there were tiny cracks in this white picket fence, comedians mocking the consensus, folk singers reminding us of times past, and a few idealists beginning to make change by marching in the streets.
Revolutionary Dreams
The Fifties came to a grinding halt on the first day of the new year. Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara led columns of ragtag rebels into Havana on January 1st, 1959. Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled Havana on New Year’s Eve. The romantic revolutionaries, fighting a guerrilla war from the mountains, had overthrown a U.S. supported, brutal dictatorship without the help of the Soviet Union or the international Communist movement. Nothing like the Cuban revolution had happened since the end of World War II. Castro’s intentions were as yet unformed. In fact, Cuba’s Communist Party had refused to support the revolution until the very end. The Cuban revolution seemed to represent a third way, somewhere between capitalism and communism, where ordinary people would run things and have a chance to shape their own future.
A few days later, on January 4th, Soviet foreign minister Anastas Mikoyan arrived in New York for an extended visit. Mikoyan was a charming guest with a remarkable background. He was the only highly placed survivor of Russia’s original revolutionary cadre. He had worked with Lenin, survived Stalin’s purges and remained Khrushchev’s closet adviser. He had a common touch and stopped at a Howard Johnson's restaurant on the New Jersey Turnpike, visited Macy's Department Store in New York City and met celebrities such as Jerry Lewis and Sophia Loren in Hollywood. He spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Detroit Club and met with Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
Mikoyan’s came at a tense time in U.S./Soviet relations. A few days before he arrived, the Soviets launched another heavy satellite, Lunik. The New York Times commented, “unquestionably the greatest achievement of the Space Age” … a sign “that the Russians have more powerful rockets and therefore greater capacity to deliver intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
As if to drive the fear home, in the spring of 1959 a young physicist who worked for the RAND corporation named Herman Kahn, toured the country with the chilling message that we could survive a nuclear war if we prepared for it. According to Kahn, the United States needed more accurate weapons and deeper fallout shelters. This would be boon to the defense industry. It would cost a fortune. More worrisome, could our leaders really be thinking about fighting a nuclear war? Some military leaders had recommended using nuclear weapons to help the French at Dien Bien Phu. General MacArthur wanted to use them during the Korean war. In both cases, civilians refused.
Kahn’s talk of surviving a nuclear war was a recruiting poster for the peace movement.
President Eisenhower approved covert action against Castro in March of 1960, and the new Cuban leader began to appoint Marxists and Communists to key positions in his government. American leaders turned against him, but Castro remained enormously popular with many Americans, particularly young people. When he came to the United States in April, he drew huge crowds at Harvard and Columbia universities.
I was scheduled to give a verbal presentation of my master’s thesis to my theses class, the afternoon Castro spoke at Columbia. My Bard buddy and I missed the beginning of the class to watch the speech. The rest of the students, all dressed neatly in their jackets and ties, looked at me in some disgust when we finally showed up. Professor Ridgely, my thesis adviser, was upset. “Where have you been, Christopher? You were scheduled to present your thesis?” he asked. “Where have you been?” I asked in some disbelief. “Fidel Castro was just in the courtyard making history!”
In contrast to the revolutionary life of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the academic life to which I aspired was represented by the Dean’s weekly sherry receptions. We would meet in a wood paneled library, filled with books, fine art, rare vases and delicate flowers, dressed in our tweed jackets with leather patches on the sleeve and brown trousers, sip dry sherry and talk with our professors and fellow graduate students about the latest articles in academic publications. It would have been unwise to mention Fidel’s name. Ralph Ginsberg’s poem Howl did come up after a reading at Columbia. No faculty members or students would admit to attending the reading. Ginsberg and the Beats were dismissed with a contemptuous sniff of sherry.
Retreat to Berkeley
Shortly after Castro’s April visit to Columbia, I had a meeting with the Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School, Jacques Barzun. My first daughter was born on April 18th, and my application for a scholarship to continue my graduate education had been denied. With my wife now unable to continue to earn money, I needed a scholarship. My thesis adviser warned me that I was unlikely to get it. Columbia had a policy against giving scholarship aid to married men with children.
Dean Barzun graciously listened as I tried to make my case that scholarship money should be designed exactly for someone in my situation. Barzun replied that his statistics told him otherwise, that most married men with children did not complete their Phd, and there was no point throwing good money after bad. He wished me well as I bowed my way out of his book lined office, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that an academic career was now out of reach.
What was a young man with a BA in Philosophy and an incomplete Masters, a non-working wife and a new baby to do in 1959? Barnie encouraged me to try technical writing. A lot of ex-communist cousins and nephews, drummed out of their professions, survived as medical and technical writers. They knew the ropes and there seemed hope for me, but interviews and writing samples led me nowhere.
Barnie set me up with an ex-red who had gone into the stock market. Sol’s office was in the apex of the Flatiron Building at 23rd and 5th Avenue. Stacks of books and papers filled every corner of the office and towers of manila folders crowded his desk, except for a small rectangle large enough for a leather bordered blotter, a pen, an ink set and two telephones.
Sol was large, two hundred pounds at least, but he was comfortable with it. A light grey jacket hung over his chair, his tie was loosened and his suspenders were tight against his belly. He had an open, friendly face, a Zero Mostel look, and he greeted me with a hearty, “I’m nailed to the wall son, whatever you do, don’t get into this fuckin’ business.” The conversation went down hill from there in terms of job prospects, with his final advice being to go back to school.
Sol got me an interview at a large Wall Street firm, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner Bean and Smith. I had just read William H. Whyte’s book, The Organization Man, another in the litany of critiques of America’s emerging middle class. In an appendix, called “How to Cheat on Personality Tests,” Whyte laid out a way to beat the system. Figure out what kind of person the corporation was looking for and model your answers on that person. Whyte provided actual test questions. I took the written exam at Merrill Lynch and got a call from the Personnel Department. I had done better on the personality test than anyone in the history of the test, and the personnel manager wanted to meet me.
The meeting began well, as I confidently answered his questions, but then he entered an area of subjectivity that threw me. “Who do love more, your mother or your father?” “What is your favorite color in nature?” “Were you closer to your brother or your sister?” When the interviewer asked for a sample of my writing, I opened my brief case and the book I was currently reading fell out on the table. It was a thick book with flaming red cover. “What are you reading,” he asked. It was my second attempt to get through Carl Marx’s Das Kapital. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, Bean and Smith declined to call me back.
By the end of September my money was running out and I had given up. I put my wife and child on a plane to San Francisco where my parents would pick them up. They would take care of them while I drove out with the remnants of our possessions.
My decision to give up New York haunted my long, dreary trip west, back to Berkeley with my tail between my legs. The used taxicab I’d bought was loaded to the roof, and I drove until exhaustion forced me to the side of the road where I slept fitfully in the front seat. Crossing through pine forests in the mountains between New Mexico and Arizona on a near empty highway at 3:00 am in the morning, I may have fallen asleep.
My front bumper caught the rear left bumper of a darkened trailer, which jackknifed, hitting my car broadside. I rolled over the top of the trailer, hit the asphalt on the roof and scraped to a stop in the oncoming lane. No one was hurt. Both of us were vagabonds on the highway with all our worldly possessions. We both lost most of them in the accident. We got off with a friendly warning and a lot of help from the Arizona Highway patrol.
I had the car towed to a junk yard, rescued what I could and shipped it off from the post office, and bought a Greyhound ticket to Oakland. For most of the trip my seat mate on the window side flipped through a large stack of pornographic magazines and loudly hummed, “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do,” as I tried and failed to sleep. I arrived in Oakland exhausted, my only prospects in life to go to work for my understanding but demanding father.
The Quiz Show Scandal
Despite my personal problems, the Fifties were over. New revolutionary leaders emerged and American protesters took credit for a test ban treaty. The times were changing. The death knell for the decade came late in 1959. Television was the instrument. The three networks over the course of the decade had replaced their expensive documentaries by established journalist like Edward R. Murrow and dramatic programming that featured great works of literature and our best writers with game shows. They were cheap to produce, and Americans loved them. They appeared to reward common Americans with uncommon knowledge, although celebrities came on the shows and celebrities were made by the quiz show. The most appealing of all the contestants was Charles van Doren, a scion of one of America’s most distinguished family of letters.
I didn’t watch game shows, but it was hard to miss Van Doren at Columbia where he was a professor. During the spring of 1958 while he was on his meteoric rise to the top of Twenty Questions, students waited for him in Columbia’s central quad carrying signs proclaiming, “the smartest man in the world.”
The only trouble was, the games were rigged. Every question, every gesture, every mopping of the brow, was written out by the show’s producers before broadcast. When the accusations became public and credible Van Doren went into hiding. Congress called a hearing. One month after the hearings began, on November 2, 1959, Van Doren emerged from hiding and confessed before the committee that he had been complicit in the fraud. One hundred and fifty other Americans lied to the Grand Jury under oath.
At a time when seeing was believing, the quiz shows scandals proved that nothing could be taken at face value. The white picket mask had had been ripped off the Fifties. Ministers preached about a loss of morality. Politicians help hearings. It was becoming more and more difficult for any of us to take anything that any authorities told us at face value.
Who better to capture this new mood than Lenny Bruce, a comic who had arrived In San Francisco while I was going to graduate school in New York. Lenny Bruce had opened at a small San Francisco club, Ann’s 440, in 1958. I saw him in the Fall of 1959 at the hungry i, where Bruce tamed down his act because hungry i owner Balducci didn’t like Bruce’s use of objectionable language. His act was still the rawest, most shocking and sometimes disturbing comic routine I had ever seen.
Ralph Gleason recalled an early performance. “His shows at Ann’s 440 included … his satire of the history of jazz, a bit about Hitler, satires on commercials, the Non Skeedo Files Again routine, and comments on the news of the day. … Sharing the bill with Lenny were Gloria Padilla, a shake dancer, the Belasco Four, and a jazz trio led by a fine pianist, Johnny Price.”
It is difficult to convey Bruce’s humor today. He was breaking language barriers we take for granted today and so much of his humor is contextual, buried in time. He attacked every taboo, including the Catholic Church that no one made fun of in the 1950s. Imitating the voice of a popular televangelist, Bruce takes a call from the Pope, “Hello Johnny! What’s shaking baby? … Ah meant to congratulate you on the election … yeah … That puff of white smoke was a genius stroke. … We got an eight page layout with Viceroy—The New Pope is a Thinking Man.” (The Viceroy cigarette slogan!). Or a long riff on making colored folks feel comfortable at a party, which always made white people squirm.
If nothing else proves how much the times were changing, it’s Lenny Bruce’s rapid acceptance by mainstream culture. Columnist Herb Caen saw Bruce at Ann’s 440 club and took Playboy’s Hugh Hefner to hear him. Hefner got Bruce a gig in Chicago that paid well and he was on his way. In April, Bruce appeared on Steve Allen’s television show.
After eight years of Eisenhower Republican rule, the country seemed ready for another change. I was determined to get involved. Barnie Conal had suggested we contact Clint Jenks, a blacklisted union organizer who was going to college at UC Berkeley. Clint had starred in the only Hollywood movie made by blacklisted professionals, Salt of the Earth. He invited us to join a discussion group.
Salesman
My father advanced me the money to get us settled in a small, rental in El Cerrito, next to Berkeley. I worked for $200 a week against expected earnings I would make from selling my father’s airline maintenance equipment. First, I had to design a catalogue of our products. He was a good engineer and draughtsman and he sold first rate maintenance equipment, everything from wheel chocks to complicated nozzles, wing stands, tail stands and tow bars. I met his suppliers, helped assemble equipment, finished the brochure and went on the road. My father already had worked the airports in San Francisco and Oakland. I would head out to the Central Valley.
In the Spring of 1960, airports in the Central Valley were small, one or two hangers, enough room for a few crop dusters and a handful of private planes. A shed served as an office and waiting room. Veterans of World War II and the Korean War managed these small airports. Their first question after my pitch, new brochure on the desk between us next to an overflowing ashtray and a collection of airplane parts, a girly calendar on the wall behind him, looking at me (the earnest college kid with the brochure), “How old are you kid?” Which I quickly learned was the prelude to no-sale.
The let down as I retreated to my car was a stone sinking in still water. How many times did I go through this same scenario? I would hit, maybe two or three airports a day. Look on a map of California. How many airports were there within a day’s drive of El Cerrito? The territory was quickly exhausted without a single sale.
I started driving out to a river bluff above the Sacramento River where I read European fiction. The advance for the house and weekly $200 draw were piling up. I needed a plan. I didn’t have one.
I came home in the afternoons and played with my daughter. She hid behind the roses in our tiny yard in El Cerrito. I went to bed early, tired of hearing my wife complain about an empty day with a demanding infant and no money. This was typical of my generation. We married young, had children quickly and provided no easy way for mothers to return to work. In the absence of traditional communities, women were isolated, home alone and frequently miserable, the potential and hope of youth gone forever in the burdens of childcare.
Shortly after my return to Berkeley, Norman Mailer came out with Advertisements for Myself, a collection of essays and fragments of fiction. Mailer’s World War II novel The Naked and the Dead had been widely praised and read since its publication in 1948. But by the mid-Fifties Mailer had gone rogue. He co-founded the Village Voice as an iconoclastic, New York City underground weekly in 1955. He published The White Negro in Dissent in 1957, in which he expressed his loss of faith in political radicalism and embraced the Beats and Hipsters (as he called them), as “courageous outcasts defying America’s repressive culture.” Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Ferlinghetti and now Mailer were surviving as artistic outcasts. I wanted to be a part of that.
I woke early, at 5:00 am in the morning, and went into the study where my daughter slept. The small room was divided by shelving filled with books, my desk on one side and my daughter sleeping on the other. I typed out literary stories with obscure plots. Rachel would wake, pull herself up in the crib and peek through the books to look at me. I’d be concentrating and then sense that I was being watched and there she would be, smiling with blind trust. My heart would soar and then sink. How would I ever take care of it all?