The Law: Back to the Unfabulous ’50s

The sounds, vaguely familiar, echo in the void: Patti Page and the Tennessee Waltz; Jo Stafford and Shrimp Boats; Rosemary Clooney and Come On-a My House. Elvis, Bobby Darin, Fabian with a slew of golden oldies. At the drive-ins, American Graffiti and The Lords of Flatbush re-create the oleaginous pompadours and switchblade rhetoric of the Shook-Up Epoch. In affluent circles there are Fabulous ’50s parties: the debutantes rigged out in calf-length skirts and open-toed, high-heeled numbers, and their dates in narrow ties and pink shirts and trousers that bag at the ankle.

Nostalgia students can hardly be astonished. The ’20s, ’30s and ’40s have all passed in review. Gatsby, The Sting and The Way We Were indicate that they are passing still. The ’50s, ever in character, have been waiting silently for their turn. No one can begrudge the decade its place in the fun; yet anyone over the age of 25 may object to the prefix Fabulous.

Coming of age in the ’50s was something less than storied. It was rather like taking a walk in a fog; one had to grope to achieve anything, from political experience to sexual savvy. It was not mere whim that caused Gadfly I.F.

Stone to call his book on the period The Haunted Fifties. Historian Fred J. Cook is harsher: his volume is entitled The Nightmare Decade. “To the young generation of today,” writes Cook, “it may seem fantastic that for a whole decade there was hardly a whisper of dissent in the land.” It was not necessarily for want of courage. Public protest and massive dissent were akin to the four-minute mile: until the first demonstration, the feat was assumed to be impossible; after that, the deluge.

While America looked on numbly, Joe McCarthy bullied Senators and scholars in his wild search for Reds in high places. Thousands of boys went off to Korea in a war that was as complex and controversial as the one in Viet Nam, but protest found its outlet at the polls, not in the streets. Ike’s promise, “I shall go to Korea,” was enough to quiet the nation. In the ’50s the flag remained unassailable, the military beyond challenge. After all, only a few years before, another group of boys had gone off to war and had returned covered with honor and rewards. The movies advertised the glories of The Sands of Iwo Jima and Battleground. Who were a bunch of 18-year-olds to dispute their elders on the draft board?

Similarly, for the young, the contours of the presidency seemed too large to measure. After Inauguration Day 1953, there was a superhero in the White House uttering homilies that few could dispute, in a language that fewer could even comprehend. (Editor Oliver Jensen was moved to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowerese: “I haven’t checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup here in this country…”) The private sector was as confusing as the federal. It was the time of ad lingo, when ideas were things that were played by ear, came off the top of the head, were run up flagpoles or got flown by the seat of the pants. The headlines hawked foreign news that seemed simultaneously remote and menacing. With scarcely a pause, World War II became the cold war—a war that seemed likely to have no winners, only losers. To the young of the ’50s, news figures assumed the permanence of bronze statuary:

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Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle, Marshall, Hemingway, Faulkner, Picasso, MacArthur, DiMaggio, Joe Louis, all seemed to have been around forever and to have a limitless future. There was no room for small figures in the pantheon. An entire generation retreated into a posture of silence, pursuing their desires down a bland alley. Pop culture—film, comics, records and below all, TV—became the national pacifier.

The Silent Generation is widely supposed to have been lobotomized by video. It is true that television, then in its adolescence, provided countless emetic hours, from Uncle Millie to Make Room for Daddy. Yet there have been no shows to equal Edward R. Murrow’s exposes of McCarthy or his muckraking analyses of the political climate on See It Now. Contemporary electronic equipment has only sharpened the picture on the tube, but not the commentary. Shows like Studio One and Playhouse 90 contributed as much pyrite as gold. But at their least, they gave good actors a shot at big roles: Rod Steiger, James Dean, Paul Newman, Anne Bancroft, Joanne Woodward were all there in living black and white. Satire, said Playwright George S. Kaufman, is what closes Saturday night. But somehow every Saturday night Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows managed to kid every facet of ’50s life, from commuters to foreign films. Satire thrived in Washington, where Cartoonist Herblock made savage, premonitory caricatures of Vice President Nixon in search of prominence. Mort Sahl earned $100,000 a year kidding the splayfoot, clayfoot maneuvers of the middle class, in and out of ofiice. Jules Feiffer, Walt Kelly, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Mad magazine all flourished in the allegedly timid decade. Jack Kerouac’s road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Gregory Corso’s curses —these too issued in the ’50s, when the beats marched to an indifferent drummer.

To be sure, the youth of the ’50s mostly made their protest vicariously.

They laughed at Sahl and Pogo, but took one step forward when they received their military greetings. They took The Catcher in the Rye to heart, but rarely ran away from home. They dug the character of Rebel Without a Cause, but concluded that James Dean carried futility on his back like a motorcycle jacket. It was easier to act like Sal Mineo, wronged and quietly suffering. It was simpler to mainline on paperbacks, to get kicks from the hot parts of the Mickey Spillane books or Peyton Place (“With her mouth almost against his, she whispered, ‘I didn’t know it could be like this…’ “).

Sexually, ’50s youth talked a far better game than they played. There was a great deal of enthusiastic probing and, once in a while, a couple went “all the way.” As befit that benighted era, the girl could thereupon be labeled as anything from a swinging chick to damaged goods. As for her date: well, the boy was just growing up. Most of the time, however, he remained stymied—by moral strictures, by lack of privacy and even by such fashionable devices as the merry widow, a maximum-security fence disguised as a bra and waist cincher.

Frustration was the order of the day, in the back seat of the car as in the front rows of the Senate. Paddy Chayefsky came closest to the true life-style in Marty, when he portrayed the endless ennui of Saturday night: “So whadda ya figure on doin’, Angie?” Small wonder that the ’50s were the predecessor of protest, pornography, youthquakes, violence, acid rock and political upheaval.

Yet the decade was never quite so drab or stagnant as its detractors would have it. In the grayness of the day came the epochal desegregation decision; through the fever of the Kefauver hearings the acute viewer could perceive a glimpse of the Mafia mind. Amid the treacle of Your Hit Parade, a few vinegary notes could be heard from the vulgarian disc jockeys, Alan Freed and Dick Clark. They were the early life signs of rock, a message that the Broadway melody was finished. In the art galleries, Jackson Pollock outraged onlookers with his whorls and spillages. On stage Elvis gyrated, and on screen Brando steamed. In the audience, the kids began to coalesce; an epoch was quietly coming to a close.

There are those who recall that epoch from the far side of the generation gap. To them, the ’50s have a unique significance, a time when history seemed very close and life was lived more intensely. For those too young to remember 1950-1960, the time is suffused with a distant romance—as all things are when they exist beyond memory. Those who came of age in the ’50s know better. To them the ’50s were the embodiment of Dickens’ phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief … it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

The ’50s were the last days of the giants—and a time of intellectual pygmyism. They did witness aesthetically frowzy fashions and square architecture —and the early stirrings of a new sensibility. They were a time of social timorousness—and the last great period of local peace. Like every decade, those years deserve their turn at recognition and revival. But those who awoke during the decade know that no Top 40 record, no fashion show or film festival can re-create the time, and they note it with some relief. For the contradictory, interesting, but not very Fabulous ’50s generation, Once is enough.