Around the cracker barrels of northern New England, their Yankee counterparts grumbled about progress and its value, or lack of it. New York was building the largest airport in the world at Idlewild. Who for? California’s Mount Palomar was completing the world’s biggest telescope. To look at the moon? Everybody knew there was no future in that. The prevailing winds of style were setting weathervanes spinning. In Europe the guns had hardly cooled and already the Germans were exporting their first snub-nosed little Volkswagens, selling in the United States for $1,280. American women were reading Flair, a magazine with holes in it, and buying Tide, the first detergent, which began appearing on shelves in 1948. A lot of old-timers around a lot of country store barrels would have approved of anything that could scrub a youth named Eden Ahbez. Ahbez was the first hippie—or prehippie, if you like—and he surfaced in 1948: a shy, gentle vegetarian with shoulder-length hair and a full beard. He encapsulated his philosophy in a song, “Nature Boy.” Nat King Cole made it the hit of the year:
There was a boy, a very strange, enchanted boy…
A little sad and shy of eye.
But very wise was he…. This he said to me:
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.”
In 1948 Allen Ginsberg was expelled by Columbia University for scribbling obscene anti-Semitic phrases on his dormitory window. The proud National Football League surprised everyone in the world of sport by deciding to merge with the All-America Football Conference. Frankie Sinatra suffered a massive throat hemorrhage; bobby-soxers drifted away to Perry Como and Frankie Laine. In Down Beat Stan Kenton nosed out Woody Herman as the country’s number one jazz band, though some critics were beginning to wonder whether musical improvisation, like the swing generation itself, wasn’t déjà vu; after touring Greenwich Village, Mary McCarthy gave the back of her tongue to “middle-aged jazz musicians in double-breasted suits trumpeting in a whisky transfiguration for middle-aged jazz aficionados, also in double-breasted suits.”
Looking back over the first half of the twentieth century, Bruce Bliven was struck by “the alteration in the moral climate from one of overwhelming optimism to one which comes pretty close to despair.” He noted that “during the first forty years of the century” there had been “a steady drift away from a sense of identification with the faiths for which the churches stood.” Bliven was looking in the wrong places. God, or someone like Him, had leaped over the altar rail and hit the sawdust trail. In 1949 His presence was identified in the vicinity of a mammoth tent erected in Los Angeles by a thirty-year-old North Carolina evangelist named William Franklin Graham—“Billy” to the chosen. That year Billy Graham drew over 300,000 Californians to his canvas shrine and converted 6,000 of them, including a crooner, a cowboy, a racketeer, and a professional athlete.
On July 4, 1946, the Philippines had become a sovereign nation. The British raj had then withdrawn from India and Burma, and in 1949 the Dutch reluctantly granted independence to Indonesia. Colonialism, another prewar institution, was withering away. The United States approved of the demise; in the light of its own origins, it could hardly have done otherwise. But older Americans who found comfort in the familiar were losing one more well-worn bench mark, and they felt uneasy. Apart from the tension crackling between Blair House and the Kremlin—which was unsettling enough—lesser stories on foreign affairs were puzzling or disturbing. Most stories about Nazi crimes had become boring. Closer to home, a cabal of Puerto Rican fanatics tried to assassinate the President in Blair House. The plot failed in spite of Harry Truman, who kept running around trying to get a better view of what was going on. Then the country relaxed; men remembered that with the incomparable Secret Service in charge, no one could kill a President.
Most Americans learned of such events from radio. The number of people who had seen a television screen was still smaller than those who had heard about it, though some popular radio programs, such as Major Bowes Amateur Hour and Town Meeting of the Air, had gone over to the tube. TV certainly needed them. Its seven-inch peepholes had been succeeded by twelve-inch and even fourteen-inch screens, and there was less of what was called “snow” in the pictures, but what the audiences were looking at was hardly worth watching. First there were the wrestlers, notably Gorgeous George, whose appearance in the ring was usually preceded by that of his valet, a small man wearing a tailcoat and bearing on a silver tray a monogrammed “GG” towel, a prayer rug, and various spray guns and atomizers, to spare his employer the stench of his competitor’s sweat. At the outset there was always a bit of contrived suspense over which outfit George would wear. (“He’s going to be in chartreuse tonight, folks! Correction, it’ll be cherry red!”) GG had 88 satin costumes and a weakness for ermine jockstraps. Describing a Georgeous George entrance for Sport in 1949, Hannibal Coons wrote:
Knotted loosely at his throat is a scarf of salmon-colored silk. His hair, a mass of golden ringlets, looks as though he has just spent four hours in a beauty parlor. George makes the grand entrance, sneering at the peons. Slowly and calmly he removes his Georgie pins—gold-plated and sequined bobby pins—and casts them to the crowd. And shakes his hair like a lordly spaniel.
After the wrestlers came the lady wrestlers. They were worse, if that is possible—great hulking earth bitches with breasts like half-loaded gunny-sacks and pubic hair dangling down their thighs. They always seemed to have cut themselves shaving. One of their pet tricks was to pin the referee beneath them until he shrieked for mercy; their fans loved that. After the network producers had more than even they could stomach, the girls were sent back to wherever they had come from, and the gaps between baseball games and prizefights were filled with Leo Selzer’s Roller Derby. The Derby was almost indescribable. Shapely hoydens were outfitted in hockey uniforms, crash helmets and roller skates and sent spinning around an old marathon dance ring, crashing into one another, clawing at each other, swearing, bleeding, crying, and, yes, pinioning the ref beneath and belting him with their steel rollers. It was thought to be merry. Families gathered round their sets couldn’t get enough of it. One of the skaters, Gerry Murray, had almost as many followers as Gorgeous George. Sportswriters were too squeamish to approve either of them. In 1949, when GG was at his peak and earning $70,000 a year, Red Smith raged in the New York Herald Tribune: “Groucho Marx is prettier, Sonny Tufts a more gifted actor, Connie Mack a better rassler, and the Princeton Triangle Club has far better female impersonators.” After watching Gerry and her fellow gamines mix it up, John Lardner wrote, “The Roller Derby is a sport. Defenestration is also a sport, for those who like it.”
Along the Atlantic seaboard television viewers, or “gawks,” as Mencken called them, were fewest per thousand inhabitants in the District of Columbia, probably because there was so much else going on there. Washington society had by now acquired a style appropriate to the seat of a great power. Georgetown was being restored; Cleveland Park had a new elegance. Chefs from benighted Europe were establishing their reputations in the huge embassies on or just off Massachusetts Avenue. In the Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Alexandria, Arlington, Bethesda, and Chevy Chase, Friday cocktail parties were the chief adult sport. Republicans were rarely seen. In the grander affairs liberal Democrats set the tone, as they had for sixteen years.
Aside from shoptalk, cocktail and dinner party conversations in Greater Washington didn’t vary much from those on the outer rims of other American metropolitan areas. In Pawling or Chestnut Hill more of the guests would know the finer points of expense account living; more would be aware that the Dow had broken through the 225 barrier and that General Motors would pay $444,377,889 in taxes this year. Here on Washington’s Macomb Street, say, or Kalorama Circle, men would have a more detailed knowledge of the status of bills in committee, and women would be likelier to rhapsodize about the marvelous job young Telford Taylor was doing in Nuremberg. But until the end of the decade had all but arrived, the enthusiasms of other well-to-do c
ommunities in the 1940s were shared by educated Washingtonians. Everyone was amused, for example, by Russell Lynes’s clever stratification of Americans into highbrows, lowbrows and middlebrows in the February 1949 Harper’s—the beginning of a whimsical parlor game that sociologists would later take up with high seriousness. Adventure stirred in the blood of male Martini drinkers marveling over the exploit of a Norwegian anthropologist who had crossed the Pacific in 101 days on a raft. Women, wearing the same mid-calf skirts to be seen in Sutton Place or Dallas’s Highland Park, might tick off the latest list of eligible bachelors, with multimillionaire Congressman John F. Kennedy near the top. (Jacqueline Bouvier was a temporary expatriate; she had dropped out of Vassar the year before to study at the Sorbonne.)
The cinema continued to be the most widely discussed form of entertainment. In its Indian summer the silver screen was showing some of its finest films: Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (Bette Davis, George Sanders, Anne Baxter); Harry Cohn’s Born Yesterday (Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford); Carol Reed’s The Third Man (Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard); Twelve O’clock High (Gregory Peck); Sunset Boulevard (Gloria Swanson); Father of the Bride (Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor); MGM’s $3,200,000 musical Annie Get Your Gun (Betty Hutton), and Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli, which would be picketed by Catholic groups because Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini’s star, had proudly borne his illegitimate son.
To put coming events in greater perspective: South Pacific was just beginning its four-year run (1,694 performances) in those last months of the 1940s. In New Haven, Ethel Merman was learning to bellow Call Me Madam. T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, and William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba were running well. The best musical play of the year was Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul. Critics were panning Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees—one wag called it “Across the Ribs and Between the Knees.” Hemingway himself was about to become the victim of a vicious Lillian Ross profile in the New Yorker. In London, George Orwell lay desperately ill. His reputation had finally been established the year before with 1984; now admirers were discovering his earlier achievements: Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, and Coming Up for Air. Orwell, supremely a figure of the 1940s, would breathe his last in the first month of the new decade.
It is of some interest that two memorable hits then in rehearsal were about witches—Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning and John Van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle—for the United States was about to enter upon the greatest witch-hunt in its history. And ironies were not confined to Broadway. It was in 1949 that Tin Pan Alley churned out a catchy tune called “I’d Like to Getcha on a Slow Boat to China.” No sooner had it displaced Huddie Ledbetter’s “Goodnight, Irene” on Your Hit Parade than the blow fell. Owing to certain events on the mainland of Asia, the country learned, no Americans were going to China for a long time. Not to put too fine a point on it, the United States had suffered the worst diplomatic defeat in its two centuries. Like the rest of the capital, Washington hostesses had known that the debacle was imminent. Not even they could have guessed the savagery of the coming recriminations, but there was a distinctly brittle quality to social functions in that first full year of Truman’s second administration. Something big was coming, it was in the air; there was no place for men to hide; soon the pall of the great suspicion would fall across the city.
***
On April 4, 1949, the day the NATO alliance was signed in the new State Department auditorium under the approving eye of Dean Acheson, a Communist general named Chu Teh began massing a million of Mao Tse-tung’s seasoned troops on the north bank of the Yangtze, the last natural barrier between Mao and the few southern provinces still loyal to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese, or Kuomintang (KMT). Chu Teh’s veterans stormed across the Yangtze on April 24, meeting only token resistance; Chiang had withdrawn 300,000 of his most reliable soldiers to form a rear-guard perimeter around Shanghai. In the first week of May Chu Teh was hammering at the gates of Shanghai, and Chiang fled across the Formosa Strait to Taiwan, taking as many Nationalist Chinese as he could. By now China was as good as lost to him. A few formalities remained: on June 26 KMT gunboats began blockading the ports of mainland China; Mao proclaimed Red China’s sovereignty on September 21—the same day as West Germany’s proclamation of sovereignty—and on December 8 Chiang announced the formation of his new government in Taipei. The world now had two Chinas. Sun Yat-sen’s fifty-year-old vision of a democratic China was dead, and Franklin Roosevelt’s expectation that Chiang would provide the non-Communist world’s eastern anchor had died with it.
The American response was slow. Troops had been fighting in China under one flag or another since September of 1931. U.S. newspapers had carried regular accounts of Chinese Communist offenses and the progressive disintegration of Chiang’s KMT since V-J Day. But China was so vast, its geography so unfamiliar, and the movements of its unmechanized armies so slow, that Americans had lost interest in the distant battles. They knew of Chiang, of course, and from time to time newspapers had carried photographs of Mao, sleek and guileful, stripped to the waist for summer marches and always chain-smoking or chewing melon seeds. But the conflict had been too complicated and too far away for the general reader. If developments became important, he had reasoned, his government would tell him about them.
It did. With the collapse of the Kuomintang, Acheson decided to lay the whole story before the people. On August 5, 1949, the State Department issued a 1,054-page White Paper conceding that the world’s largest nation had fallen into Communist hands, announcing the cessation of aid to Nationalist China, and setting forth the chain of events which had led to this tragic end. Three American generals—Stilwell, Hurley, and Marshall—had tried in vain to persuade Chiang to break the power of his KMT warlords and rid the Nationalist Army of corruption and defeatism. Over two billion dollars of U.S. aid had come to Chiang since V-J Day. Virtually all of it had been a waste of powder and shot; 75 percent of the American arms shipped to the KMT had wound up in Mao’s hands. In his introduction to the White Paper, Acheson bluntly called Chiang’s regime incompetent, corrupt, and insensitive to the needs of its people. He added:
The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result…. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not.
To knowledgeable Washingtonians this was apparent, even superfluous. But the U.S. public was bewildered. All this talk of KMT inefficiency was a switch. The China it knew—Pearl Buck’s peasants, rejoicing in the good earth—had been dependable, democratic, warm, and above all pro-American. Throughout the great war the United Nations Big Four had been Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Chiang. Stalin’s later treachery had been deplorable but unsurprising. But Chiang Kai-shek! Acheson’s strategy to contain Red aggression seemed to have burst wide open. His own White Paper admitted that Mao’s regime might “lend itself to the aims of Soviet Russian imperialism.” Everything American diplomats had achieved in Europe—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO—momentarily seemed annulled by this disaster in Asia.
Nor was that all. In late August, while editorial writers were still digesting the White Paper and the last daring Chinese Nationalists were sailing in junks from mainland ports to Taiwan, a B-29 flying laboratory returned from an Asian flight with dismaying photographs. The B-29’s mission had been to gather stress routine. Its pictures were expected to interest only low-level technicians. When developed, however, they revealed clear traces of radioactive material. There could be but one explanation: an atomic explosion somewhere in Russia. This was a massive jolt; Americans had been told that the Soviet Union could not develop a nuclear weapon before the late 1950
s, if ever. Told the news, President Truman shook his head again and again, asking, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” Then, convinced, he said heavily, “This means we have no time left.”
He waited three weeks before telling the public. On September 23 he authorized the release of a terse statement: “We have evidence an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” When they were handed copies of it, White House correspondents raced to their phones. After they had gone, the President lay low, anticipating an angry public reaction. His cabinet also made itself scarce, with one notable exception. Acheson was beginning to suspect that Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson was afflicted by mental illness, and Johnson’s behavior that Friday seemed probative. He made himself available to the press, discussed troop dispositions, and said lightly of the Russian bomb, “Now, let’s keep calm about this. Don’t overplay the story.” Most responsible editors, worried about the possibility of mass hysteria, were already trying to understate the announcement, but there was no way to soften the blow. In Chicago physicist Harold C. Urey told reporters he felt “flattened.” He said: “There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb—that’s two nations having it.”
Now the administration began to pay for the President’s campaign excesses the year before. Then the Republicans had nominated a gentleman who had been beaten by a slugger. Studying campaign stories from small newspapers through whose towns Truman had passed, they had discovered after November 2 how savage he had really been. They were going to flay this administration any way they could, and the Asian crisis and the loss of America’s nuclear monopoly were gut issues. Increasingly one heard from the Republican side of the Senate floor that the administration had “lost” China—that the responsibility for Chiang’s defeat lay in Washington, among traitors who had cunningly worked with other Communists abroad to bring Mao to power. It was all a Red conspiracy, the litany ran, and it all began when Roosevelt went to Yalta.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 73