1950: When Nothing Was the Same

The pace of life in America at midcentury was infinitely more languid than it is today. The population of the U.S. was just 151,325,798 in 1950, compared with 248,764,170 in the latest census. In both its demographics and, perhaps far more important, its self-image, America 50 years ago was dramatically whiter.

The pace of business in this precomputer, prefax, pre-Internet era paralleled the pace of technology: Not by chance was it the age of business lunches that often featured three martinis. In June 1951, when I graduated from high school, the Dow stood at 250. Yes, 250.

Geographic distances were far more imposing. In general, people communicated with one another less often and far more slowly. On the rural outskirts of Winsted, Connecticut, where I grew up, our family still had a party telephone line (1987-J3, three rings for our phone), which meant your neighbors could listen in on your calls and in fact sometimes did. If you wanted to call someone long distance, a call that was considered something of an important and expensive event in those days, you always placed the call through the operator and made it person to person.

There were no cell phones and only a handful of computers, primarily in the hands of the Department of Defense. The room in the Defense Department where the first computer was stationed was always hot. In the mid-Forties, Tom Watson Jr., of the IBM Watsons, had visited the giant room and asked Pres Eckert, one of the computer's inventors, why it was always so uncomfortable in there. Because we're sharing the place with 18,000 radio tubes, Eckert answered.

Air travel for most Americans was still an exception. My 19-year-old daughter has flown hundreds of times; I took my first commercial airplane ride when I was 23. Commercial flight aboard jet planes did not exist. Fittingly enough, major league baseball defined the country and travel was done by train. Washington was a Southern city, and St. Louis a Western one. America for all intents and purposes was based in the East, and a person who lived in California but had come East to college was considered a curiosity of sorts, almost as exotic a specimen of human life as someone from, say, American Samoa.

The federally blessed and financed highway system was still six years away, and its official name--the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways--recalls how it would be sold to the nation as a defense against the Russians. Still, American eyes were very much on the road; we were buying more and more cars, ever larger and glitzier, with more accoutrements than ever before. Americans also turned them in ever more quickly as the nation's level of affluence and, equally important, its level of optimism increased stunningly fast.

Words, not images, were the prime currency of communication. Television was in its infancy. Ed Murrow, the single most distinguished voice of broadcasting--a radio voice--shied away from television, as did most of his top radio reporters. A few years into the decade, when CBS needed someone to head its fledgling television broadcast, it somewhat reluctantly settled on Walter Cronkite, largely regarded as a benchwarmer by the elite Murrow people.

Newspapers were all-powerful. Political candidates aspiring to higher office studied the personal proclivities of print reporters, not the deadlines and schedules of the network news shows. The person whose approval they coveted was Scotty Reston, rising star of The New York Times' Washington bureau. The idea that ambitious press secretaries would seek out executive producers from network television to check their schedules was unheard of two decades ago. Satellite technology, which would eventually allow us to watch warfare in our living rooms, was still far away.

The evening news shows were in their embryonic stage; the first NBC news host was a former Shakespearean actor named John Cameron Swayze. He used quaint phrases like "Let's hopscotch the world for headlines," and did commercials as well. A limited number of sports events were televised. The World Series was popular and so were the Friday night fights, sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades ("Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp"). Pro football was a virtual minor league, its marriage to network television still years away. Early games, because of poor reception, often seemed to be taking place in a blizzard, and it sometimes looked as if 44 instead of 22 football players were on the field. To this day when I think of that era I think of it in black and white; I think of the Sixties in color.

A bitter war started in Korea on June 25, 1950. Even in its nomenclature it was found wanting: The president of the United States referred to it as a police action rather than a war, as if people did not get killed quite as dead in a police action as in a war. For most Americans Korea seemed distant, unpalatable and frustrating. The young men who were the sons of the elite--of the nation's decision makers--graduated from high school and in great numbers duly went off to college, immunized from the draft by II-S deferments. Working-class, blue-collar young men got drafted and went to Korea. It was the beginning of a class division over who served and fought for whom in this country, and it would eventually become a chasm.

The country largely seemed to turn away from the war in Korea and, because communications were still so primitive and because America's survival did not seem to be at stake, the conflict was only in the most marginal sense portrayed on the television news shows of that era. The war never worked itself into the national bloodstream as the Vietnam war would, becoming, in Michael Arlen's famous phrase, the "living room war." Korea neither united nor divided the country, though Harry Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur in April 1951 divided the country along powerful existing divisions. Some of these divisions were cultural and ethnic, some were ideological. Liberals tended to endorse Truman, conservatives to abhor him. In the 1952 election there was a surfacing of a new cultural-political division: Democrats for Eisenhower, many of them Catholic.

Midcentury was a far more static and hierarchical time. The economy remained blue collar and industrial, driven by muscularity and not brains. A line worker at Ford or General Motors might well make more than a professor at the University of Michigan. Because no bombs had touched us during World War II, and because Europe had engaged in suicidal war twice within 25 years, America was rich in a world that was poor.

In the nation's biggest industries--auto and steel--a genuine if occasionally uneasy peace had been worked out between unions and companies. There was a general perception that the American pie was big enough for everyone.

America was still a Calvinist society. The economic, social and technological forces which would soon assault that Calvinism were just building. Work mostly meant long, hard physical exertion for relatively limited rewards. Memories of bleak times, of massive national economic reverses like the Depression, which could wipe out all of a family's gains overnight, were fresh. If there was some degree of optimism about the economic future, it was balanced with an innate wariness.

People coming of age in this increasingly affluent economy were more confident and optimistic than their parents and more willing to do something new and seemingly un-American: buy on credit. Their parents, fearful of economic vagaries outside their control, hated the concept of debt and considered buying anything, save perhaps a home, which few in the past could have afforded, virtually immoral.

Big companies dominated the landscape: Ford, General Motors, General Electric, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse. The brightest graduates of the country's best business schools, it was expected, would work for these companies. The move toward venture capital, the idea of talented young businessmen marrying with talented young scientists and doing their own start-up companies, was still more than a decade away. After both a world war and a depression, this was a time when talented young people sought security.

The meritocracy--where talent was more important than bloodlines--was just coming of age. As such, lines of ethnicity still held. In New York there were Wasp banking houses and Wasp law firms to do their legal work, just as there were Jewish law firms to do the heavy lifting for the Jewish banks. The Wasp establishment dominated the business (and foreign policy) landscape. In those days the right family and connections could get you into the right boarding schools, colleges, banking and law firms, and then often high into the government. The meritocracy, aided by the GI Bill, would soon transform the nation with stunning force. It already had a toehold in America's great universities.

In June 1950, an immigrant from Germany named Henry Kissinger graduated (summa cum laude) in government from Harvard; another, Zbigniew Brzezinski, from Poland, entered graduate school in September. The idea that these two heavily accented men would become top figures in the national security complex was unthinkable at the time.

No one spoke of a "fast track" in the Fifties. There was an assumption that, talented or not, you went out after (continued on page 268) when nothing was the some(continued from page 184) graduation, did an apprenticeship and paid your dues before you were duly rewarded. The concept of being duly rewarded was much more modest. There was no such thing as a baby millionaire or billionaire. Millions of Americans were entering the middle class, but they were doing it tentatively, more than a little unsure of their way.

I was always convinced that no small part of Playboy's success in its early years, in addition to its being a precursor of the energies and curiosities which would be part of the sexual revolution, was that it served as a guide to middle-class life. To me The Playboy Advisor was one of the most important parts of the magazine, telling young men who were the first members of their families to graduate from college how to enjoy the fruits of their new success, how to behave in a restaurant and which wine to order with which courses.

The sense of limited ceilings, particularly financial ones, was very much a part of the assumptions of my generation. I remember clearly the moment in 1954, my junior year in college, when my classmates and I began to talk seriously about career choices. We would sit around in the Harvard Crimson newsroom discussing whether or not we should enter journalism, which was not yet a profession and which was still trying to escape the image, created by contemporary fiction and movies, of a bunch of canny but unscrupulous police reporters.

Back and forth we would go--Jack Langguth, Tony Lukas, Dick Ullman, Dick Burgheim and myself. Could journalism be a respectable enough career? Could we make a decent middle-class living? We decided that the target salary for a decent living would be about $5000 a year and the timetable called for making it some five years after graduation. I remember that in my fifth year out of college and my fourth on the Nashville Tennessean, publisher Silliman Evans raised me from $95 a week to $125, which put me over the magical $5000 mark right on deadline.

Journalism turned out to be an ascending profession. As America sought its role as a great international power, better-educated reporters were required to write for better-educated readers. Tony Lukas went on to a distinguished career and won two Pulitzer Prizes; Jack Langguth worked for The New York Times in Saigon, wrote books and later taught at USC; Dick Ullman became more of an academic than a journalist, though he did, for a while, write editorials for the Times; and Dick Burgheim became executive editor of People.

Gender lines were sharply drawn 50 years ago. Bright young women went to college, more often than not got better grades than men and upon graduation married young men often less gifted than they. These women ended up with several children, driving station wagons in America's burgeoning new suburbs. They often wondered about the choices they had made.

In 1950 Betty Friedan had not yet had her second child nor moved to the suburbs of New York, where she would find that her summa cum laude college degree was of little use and where her frustrations over the intellectual emptiness of her life were soon to mount and help ignite a revolution.

The culture was infinitely more predictable, and more settled. Young people did not yet define themselves by their musical tastes, nor did they use their music to set themselves apart from their parents. Frank Sinatra was the most popular singer for the middle-aged and the young.

Television sitcoms of that era were marvelously sanitized--in effect, virtual portraits of virtual families, despite the darkness and unresolved questions of love and sexuality that existed then as now. I graduated from high school in 1951 and from college in 1955, and, amazing as it seems, I did not know a single person at either place who had used drugs. Contraception was more limited and so too were the sexual mores of that time. Few of us knew men and women who lived together without being married in the years immediately after college.

If there were anxieties in those days they tended to be political rather than economic. In late August of 1949 the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb, nicknamed Joe One after Joseph Stalin. The U.S. and the Soviet Union, both essentially isolationist in the years before World War II, had been catapulted to superpower status in the atomic age. Scientists in both countries were already scrambling to create the hydrogen bomb.

Inevitably, the debate about security and who was a risk intensified with the arms race. Robert Oppenheimer, the guiding genius of America's brilliant wartime atomic effort, was found in the early Fifties (in no small part because of his lack of enthusiasm for the hydrogen bomb project) to be a security risk. Evidence of early left-wing tendencies, which had not been considered serious in a prior incarnation, became important in this new and meaner time. People debated whether or not to build bomb shelters on their property; some even debated the morality of whether or not to let their shelterless neighbors use theirs in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

From the perspective of today, mid-century America seems orderly. Vernon Presley had just moved his small family from Tupelo to Memphis, where he took a job at $38.50 a week in a paint factory and where his family lived in a federal housing project. Vernon's only son, Elvis, much maligned because of his weird name, his greasy duck's-ass haircut, geeky clothes and androgynous looks, was regarded as class sissy and was a target for the tough guys at Humes High. He was three years away from walking into a local record-it-yourself studio and cutting his first record.

The birth control pill was some 15 years away in terms of popular use. The idea that men might go to the moon seemed so distant as to be laughable. John Kennedy's election as the first Catholic president--and first television-age president--was a decade away. In 1952 the fact that Adlai Stevenson had been divorced was held against him.

Seen now, at the end of so jarring a century, when adjustment to new technological forces is so critically important, midcentury seems not only innocent but seductively simple. Life was also significantly less threatening, particularly for those in the ruling majority and those who actually exercised power. Their nerves were by and large less jangled. (Life for those who were outsiders in 1950 was harder; their nerves were jangled, but they simply did not know it.) There is for a variety of reasons a great nostalgia for that time. As for me, I have little nostalgia. I think memory is often selective, especially among Americans who want their neighbors to live as they did in the Fifties while they themselves enjoy the far greater freedoms of the Nineties.

The Birth Control Pill Was 15 Years Away. The Idea That Men Might Go To The Moon Seemed Laughable.