A Fifties Memoir -- New Book Provides Compelling Look At How This Curious Decade Shaped Postwar American Life

When you put down David Halberstam's new book, you may be inclined to agree with Leonard Bernstein: "Elvis Presley," the famed conductor told a friend, "is the greatest cultural force in the 20th century."

It wasn't that Elvis was the best singer, for he wasn't, or that he became a great movie actor, because he didn't. Yet when the pompadoured rockabilly belter appeared on Ed Sullivan's television variety show in 1956, American society was irrevocably changed.

"I think that it was an incredibly important political moment," said Halberstam yesterday in a conversation at his Seattle hotel. "It said: The old order cannot hold. When Ed Sullivan had to give in to the power of youthful demographics, we were beginning a major shift in American culture."

Sullivan, a stiff and moralistic gossip columnist-turned-TV host, had resisted the provocative young singer most frequently described as "swivel-hipped" for his high-energy performances. But after TV rival Steve Allen hosted Elvis - and beat Sullivan in the ratings for the first time - Sullivan quickly ceded defeat and signed Presley for three appearances.

"Elvis was important because, one, he was a white face on black music, and because he was the leading figure in the coming of a youth culture," said Halberstam. "For the first time, music became a defining event in young people's lives."

Yet Elvis was just one of myriad forces - political, cultural, technological - at work in the nation in that curious decade, the 1950s. For those who lived through it, it was a decade that can evoke an awkward mixture of nostalgia, pride and bitterness, and Halberstam compellingly explores it all in his new work, "The Fifties" (Villard, $27.50).

Setting the stage

It is a large book - 800 pages, with notes - yet it is a fascinating, smoothly synthesized account of an era that really began in the late 1940s with the explosion unleashed by the shift from a wartime economy to a consumer economy and by America's new standing as one of the world's two superpowers. Halberstam takes us from the postwar politics that set the stage for the decade's paranoia over communism, through the "forgotten" Korean War and our subsequent nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, to the vast northward migration of African Americans from the South and the burgeoning civil rights movement.

And along the way, there's Marlon Brando, Cadillac tail fins, the growth of suburbs, and the McDonald brothers, Dick and Mac, of hamburger fame. Also, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and the TV quiz-show scandals that permanently scarred a young academic named Charles Van Doren.

Why the '50s?

"I grew up in it, for one thing," said Halberstam, who at 59 has won about every journalistic prize, including the Pulitzer. "I don't think I'll ever do an autobiography. Journalistic memoirs, with very few exceptions, don't have much texture because in your professional life you're filing minutiae, small stories that reflect this or that report or the latest news released by the government.

`A quiet decade'

"This is my way of doing an `exterior' autobiography, reflecting the time I grew up. I graduated from high school in '51, from college in '55, and my young manhood, my apprenticeship, was in the South in the '50s.

"The one thing I really knew," he added, "was that while it was a more quiet decade, most of the things that exploded in the '60s had their roots in the '50s."

Halberstam opens his book with a look at the political situation in the late 1940s, including Harry Truman's stunning presidential victory in 1948 - a re-election that no one predicted. Simultaneously there was the troubling case of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of spying for the Soviets, which laid the groundwork for Sen. Joseph McCarthy's virulent, four-year witchhunt for supposed communists in the U.S. government and military.

Halberstam sees a pattern in the hysteria.

"I think one party deliberately orchestrated those tensions for domestic political purposes," he said, noting that Truman's unexpected victory struck fear in Republicans' hearts that they would be a permanent minority party. There soon followed, he said, a conscious attempt to steer the national political debate to the issue of domestic subversion.

The conflict in Korea has been called "the forgotten war" - indeed, that's the title of the most recent history of that war - and for all of us who have forgotten it, Halberstam's book offers a concise and riveting recapitulation.

"The American Century was about to begin, but clearly no one wanted to pay for it," writes Halberstam, noting that the Army had shrunk to fewer than 600,000 soldiers in the postwar years. "A certain schizophrenia was at work here: We wanted to be the policeman of the world, particularly in Asia, but we certainly did not want to get involved in a messy, costly foreign war."

Yet we did exactly that - aided in no small way by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the World War II hero who commanded U.S. forces in the Pacific. Through a combination of "arrogance, foolishness and vainglory," Halberstam writes, MacArthur managed to draw Communist China's involvement and add two years to a conflict against the North Koreans.

"(MacArthur) was to damage profoundly America's relations with China," writes Halberstam, "and he was to help start a chain of events that was poisonous in terms of domestic politics - feeding political paranoia, giving the paranoiacs what they needed most: a tangible enemy."

The entrepreneurial spirit

Yet "The Fifties" is not all politics and war. Some of the most interesting chapters involve visionary entrepreneurs who correctly sensed changes in the consuming public. Halberstam paints fascinating portraits of Kemmons Wilson, who founded Holiday Inns after becoming disenchanted with motels on a family vacation; Ray Kroc, who began franchising the McDonald brothers' successful San Bernardino, Calif., hamburger stand and eventually bought them out; Eugene Ferkauf, who founded E.J. Korvettes discount stores; and William Levitt, the builder who applied Henry Ford's assembly-line techniques to home construction and made it possible for middle-class families to escape to the suburbs.

Even more significant was the fact that birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger brought together scientist Gregory Goodwin (Goody) Pincus and heiress Katharine Dexter McCormick, a financial union that led to the Pill. More than anything, though, the decade witnessed the ascendancy of television, a change of staggering proportions affecting everything from entertainment to advertising to journalism.

"I have this view that television creates an enormous interest in public affairs - the whole country is wired together," said Halberstam. "As my colleague Daniel Schorr has said, TV news is `our nightly evening seance' - and that's a huge quantum leap."

News on television

Besides "I Love Lucy" and "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," television also made possible the civil rights movement by documenting its early struggles: a young John Chancellor reporting live from Little Rock, Ark., offered a new set of indelible images for millions of Americans.

"The civil rights movement and the networks needed each other, together they had a synergistic effect," said Halberstam. "Dr. King wanted for this morality play to go on every night, and it was a great running news story for the networks - and it gave them a kind of moral legitimacy."

Halberstam added that while the '50s were a simpler time and families were under relatively fewer pressures, we have developed a "sanitized" collective view of the era.

"We remember not the way we lived," he said, "but the way we broadcast how we lived."