The Half-Century: The View from 1950

Nothing—literally nothing—had been left untouched by 50 years of progress. New York on Jan. 1, 1900 had been innocently delighted with the snowflakes (the kind “that wear well”); but by the Christmas season of 1949, improvements had been made even in this department. Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center designed its own snowflakes: they were of plastic, 19 inches in diameter, held by a pin to a 10-foot pipe.

When the wind blew, they spun. Explained a spokesman for the Center: “We hoped they’d spin, but aerodynamically I’m surprised that they do.” He added: “It’s not the greatest substitute in the world for the real thing, but it’s so hard to keep real snow around here.” Men were assigned to go about inspecting the pins and tightening them up so that the winter wind would not rattle the snowflakes. In an older lore, the care of snowflakes had been entrusted only to the nicest angels; the Rockefeller Center man said that maintenance of their snowflakes was “in the province of the carpenter.”

Thus another job had been de-skilled by the American genius for organization.

What Would He Do? It was easy to laugh at such antics of the mid-century American; he did a good deal of laughing at himself, knowing that he had come far in a hurry and was somewhat ludicrously unsure of where he was or where he was going. Munching a chocolate bar, drinking a Coca-Cola, the American bestrode the narrow world; what he would do next was a prime question in the minds of men everywhere.

Could he, for example, keep up his amazing industrial progress? A few months before the half-century ended, that question was answered with an emphatic yes in an Atlantic Monthly article by Harvard Economist Sumner H. Slichter (TIME, Nov. 7).

To estimate how much the U.S. might be able to produce in 1980, Slichter started with four reasonable assumptions:

1) the population would be 175 million; 2) the same proportion of the population would be working then as now; 3) the average amount a worker produces in an hour will continue to rise, at the 2%-per-year rate as it has for several generations; 4) the average work week will be cut by onefourth. Most important of these assumptions is No. 3. If more and better machinery, and more and better industrial organization continues to raise productivity at the old rate, 1980’s worker will be able to turn out 88.4% more in an hour than the worker of 1948.

On the basis of his four assumptions (adjusted by some other considerations), Slichter suggests that “by 1980 the output of goods and services of the American economy, which was $246.7 billion in 1948, will be at least $416 billion (in terms of present prices) and that it is more likely to be considerably larger—probably in excess of $550 billion a year.”

Slichter thinks that the old 2% rate of annual productivity increase might be jacked up to 3%. Then the U.S. could produce 70% more goods in the next 30 years than it has produced in the last 150 years. Slichter says: “One is fairly safe in predicting that the U.S. will gradually become a country of two car families” and “millions of [family size swimming] pools may be installed.”

More important, “A nation on a 30 hour week will have more opportunity to pursue a multitude of arts, from gardening to painting and writing, than any people has ever possessed. Surely the chance is good that the arts will flourish in the U.S. as never before in the history of the world.”

On Big Brotherism? This sounded like the smuggest predictions of 1900—but there was a difference. By 1950 men had learned (or half-learned) that progress was neither automatic nor irreversible. Slichter was talking about what might happen, not about what would necessarily happen. An equally plausible view of the future was given in another mid-century prediction, George Orwell’s satiric Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell saw the world divided into rival dictatorships. Britain, freedom’s old home, is “Airstrip One” and its people, A.D. 1984, are controlled in every thought and act by Big Brother. Winston Smith, the pathetic hero, wakes in the morning to compulsory gymnastics directed by a virago who can see him from a two-way “telescreen” which takes pictures as well as projects them.* Winston’s day is spent falsifying history to suit Big Brother, and when Winston rebels, Big Brother has ready for him a deeper slavery. There was a real danger that the trapped, submissive Winston Smith might be as truly the man of the next half-century as Winston Churchill had been the man of the last.

Would the world in the next 30 years go to the Slichterian heaven or the Orwellian hell? That was a political—and therefore a moral—question. In 1900 scientists had not greatly concerned themselves with political or moral issues, but as the half-century ended they knew themselves to be very deeply involved in such questions. A sharp warning on the political future came from a scientist, Dr. Vannevar Bush, wartime boss of the Government’s scientific mobilization and head of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

He told Massachusetts Institute of Technology students that the U.S. could not meet the threat of dictatorship “if we turn this country into a wishy-washy imitation of totalitarianism, where every man’s hand is out for pabulum, and virile creativeness has given place to the patronizing favor of swollen bureaucracy.

“Dictatorship can compete with dictatorships, and a free virile democracy can outpace any such in the long pull. But a people bent on a soft security, surrendering their birthright of individual self-reliance for favors, voting themselves into Eden from a supposedly inexhaustible public purse, supporting everyone by soaking a fast disappearing rich, scrambling for subsidy, learning the arts of political logrolling and forgetting the rugged virtues of the pioneer, will not measure up to competition with a tough dictatorship.”

Cold War to Hot Peace? Russia was already far along toward Orwell’s version of 1984 and Russia represented the greatest threat to the U.S. In the last few years of the half-century the U.S. met that threat with the cold war, which served its limited purpose of checking Communist expansion in Western Europe. The cold war, however, had not stopped the Communist advance in Asia and it had not prevented the Russians from acquiring the ability to make atomic bombs.

These two facts created a new situation in which the cold war was inadequate. Instead of a limited, defensive rivalry with Communism, the U.S. needed an active policy based on two propositions, boldly announced: 1) it would not tolerate further Communist advances anywhere, 2) wherever it saw a chance of helping to free a people from Communist control, it would do so. Only the President of the U.S. could lay that policy on the line, and even he could not do so effectively unless the people saw that it was a political and moral necessity to prevent war by so doing.

In other words it was up to the American people to close out the cold war and to embark on a far more difficult adventure—the hot peace.

The hot peace would need the help of U.S. technology. It would have to be protected by U.S. arms. But its main drive would have to be in the field of politics and morals. Here was the rub. A generation of Americans had been educated in the principles of Professor John Dewey, a man of good will who believed that the progress in physical sciences worked automatically for the benefit of men of good will. The University of Chicago’s Robert Hutchins had pointed out the fundamental flaw in Dewey’s pragmatic materialism.

“The difference between us and Mr. Dewey is that we can defend Mr. Dewey’s goals, we can argue for democracy and humane ends, and Mr. Dewey cannot. All he can do is to say he is for them. He cannot say why, because he can appeal only to science, and science cannot tell him why he should be for science or democracy or for humane ends . . . If we follow the road marked out by Mr. Dewey, we may increase our wealth . . . But we shall find that technology is not a substitute for justice; we shall not know what to do with our lives; we shall not know how to live with ourselves; and we shall discover at last that the machine has enslaved us all.”

To mobilize the free world, the U.S. would have to rediscover its own moral convictions. If it did that, there would be no need to fear a lack of response from other lands. Defenses against Stalinism and Big Brotherism would be found wherever the surface of recent history was scratched in tales of obscure heroes. Here is one from Guillain de Bénouville’s history of the French Resistance:

“An old man of 70 was taken to the Cháteau de Brax and tortured before the eyes of his 18-year-old granddaughter. The Germans said to the girl: ‘If you want to save your grandfather, talk!’ Neither the girl nor the old man said a word.”

This is a commonplace 20th Century story. The task of political leadership in the 1950’s is to bring this valor and love of freedom in ordinary men to bear upon events—before the extremity of the torture chamber is reached. By 1950 it was apparent that unless the U.S. did that job, it would not get done. For this task the American would need more confidence in his own values of freedom than he showed as the half-century ended. He would need to find ways to transfer his conviction into effective political unity of free men everywhere. If he could do that, history would forgive him his recent unreadiness for destiny, his plastic snowflakes—and much besides.

*Last week some indignant citizens of New York saw an Orwellian shadow in Grand Central Terminal broadcasts which they could not turn off (See NATIONAL AFFAIRS).