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The Fifties Remembered

By Stephen Herold

Jan 17, 2002 -- We have a seemingly inexhaustible fascination with, not just our past, but the past of the "good old days" where everything was better and life only a romantic idyll among period piece props. The trouble is that every era, including those that we view as our "good old days", thought their lives ordinary drudge and looked back to a yet-more ancient "good old days". An old farmer I knew many years ago put it so well when he told me "things ain't what they used to be, and they never were neither."

Of course, for the last 20 years or so we have lived in an era of massive media make-believe that requires an immense quantity of raw material to spin its profit making bullshit that we accept as truth and reality. "Retro" periods are proclaimed and discarded with blurring speed as they lose their ability to make us buy things that mimic some trivial part of another time. I am already hearing noises about "antiques" from the '80s. Yet there is a decade that lingers in our hearts simultaneously as the last of the good old days and the beginning of modern times--the '50s. To those of us who lived through it with open eyes and a thinking mind, it is hard to fathom this mock nostalgia for what was, then and in retrospect, a boring, unimaginative and colorless time.

David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has caught and described the decade as they really were in his spellbinding book The Fifties. I picked up a copy off the bookstore shelf last week and kept it with me until all its 733 pages of text were read. Neither a connected history nor an analysis of the decade, The Fifties is a collection of vignettes of people, events and attitudes that accurately describes the '50s as it was to live them and why they are so vital to us today. Starting with the stunning election victory of Harry Truman over icy cold Dewey and ending with John Kennedy's epoch-making victory in 1960 over the already dishonest Nixon, Halberstam presents compelling evidence of America shedding its small town head in-the-sand past for change and a run at self awareness and world domination.

Moving back and forth across the American canvas, Halberstam paints pictures of politicians, the Korean War and the fall of MacArthur, the Beats, the birth of Rock, the death of segregation and much more. Ralph Nader strode out of the '50s as did Elvis Presley; the first LSD sessions began in the '50s along with the morality-shattering "Pill." Television became the lifeblood of American beliefs, swamping movie theaters and churches alike, and it showed its power in destroying Senator McCarthy and mesmerizing us with quiz shows and sitcoms. Never had the vicious prejudices and mindless anti-intellectual foundation of America been laid so naked and obvious as when television elevated both to cult status.

And over all this, dominating the decade like an evil stench, was the Cold War and atom bombs. To someone who did not live through it this sounds like a mere phrase of speech, a hiccup in history. It wasn't. To an isolationist nation that only accidentally fought Spain and gained an empire, and that was dragged unwillingly into WWI, this was a confusing and frightening time. We went from WWII to the Korean War, the Berlin and Cuba crises and disaster in Vietnam so quickly that it seemed like war and total destruction was all we could look forward to. It both numbed to optimism and frightened the public into seemingly logical acts that we now view as aberrations. Bomb shelters and civil defense, the draft and practicing atom bomb shelter under our school desks may seem strange and amusing, but they were not. The '50s were perhaps the last time that fear and survival, the story of most of mankind for its entire existence, drove our lives and controlled our daily thoughts.

As much as is possible in a secondhand experience, reading The Fifties can give anyone a deep respect for why and how American life is what it is today. All that with the pleasure of a smoothly written piece of prose that is hard to put down. This Pulitzer Prize is well-deserved.

Stephen Herold runs the Wit's End Bookstore in Fremont. He is a regular contributor to the Seattle Press.

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Bob Roysdon Aug 24, 2003 Peoria,Az. Retired
I have not read the book yet.You have made me very interested in this book.Great job in you writing skills..Keep up the good work..Bob in Az.ps Do you have a extra copy??