It wasn’t. The returns of any political contest reflect, at most, the persuasion of those people who voted. As Theodore H. White has pointed out, mid-century America was always Republican until 5 P.M. on election day, when working men and women, on their way home, decided whether or not to stop at the polls. If they did, and only if they did, the country would go Democratic. In 1946 they didn’t. A low vote—34 million—meant that Democrats in large numbers, discontented with the times and missing White House leadership, had stayed away. But Republicans misinterpreted the returns. They thought the people were disillusioned with the New Deal and wanted a swift return to the simplistic, pre-Crash, golden 1920s. That being true, they reasoned, they need only bait Truman during the next two years. Then the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania would be returned to them.
FOURTEEN
Life with Harry
In wartime the streams of history merge. Each of the republic’s constituencies sees the struggle as a whole because everyone shares it and even participates in it, if only vicariously. Afterward the currents divide again. Insularity returns. The week remembered at the State Department for a reciprocal trade agreement recalls a merger in Wall Street, a fire sale on Main Street, a beauty contest in Pine Bluff, the installation of an Oriental rug for a young matron, and the World Series to fifty million baseball fans.
For President watchers, the four years, ten months, and ten days between V-J Day and Korea were one long succession of crises. In Washington the kitchen was always hot, and Harry Truman was always in it. Once he slipped away to visit Mexico, whose president showed him an erupting volcano. Harry said, “That’s nothing compared to what I have back home.” But of course there was more to the era than that. Truman saw events in a special light. He was the President, and men in high places have always been preoccupied with national destiny.
The hiatus between the two wars was certainly a time of tremendous flux. But it was peaceful. The guns were mute, the bombers grounded, the warships at anchor, the marines off doing pushups. It was a lacuna, a breathing space for the children of the Depression who had come of age overseas, and in this gentle nexus the college graduates of the swing generation—those likeliest to emerge as America’s leaders in the 1960s and 1970s—returned to the arms of their girls, now young women. “Do you know what you are?” Elspeth Rostow would ask her husband early one morning in 1961 during the Bay of Pigs crisis. “You are all the junior officers of the Second World War, come to responsibility.”
Later, in the Johnson years, a Washington wit described the capital as “a city inhabited by powerful men and the women they married when they were young.” That was unkind, and in its implication that postwar weddings had been casual detours from the highway of ambition it was also inaccurate. To the young veterans and their brides the late 1940s were exquisite years of easy laughter and lovers’ vows, whose promises lingered like the fragrance of incense burning in little golden vessels on the altars of the heart. To be young and uncrippled was to be unbelievably lucky; to marry was to give of oneself, an exchange of gifts that multiplied in joy. It was a kind of fragile kaleidoscopic montage, held together by youthful passion, of a million disjointed sounds, colors, scents, tastes and snatches of quite ordinary Tin Pan Alley music; of an advertisement half glimpsed over a stranger’s upturned collar on a Fifth Avenue double-decker bus; of the oleomargarine that came white in plastic bags with a yellow dye pill and had to be squeezed; of Kem-tone that came in a powder that you mixed; of knowing what it was like to lie in bed together chain-smoking in that last decade before they took the fun out of cigarettes.
And it was playing charades with other young couples. And Alec Guinness’s punting scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets. And that six-month wait for the first postwar Ford or Chevy, and shopping for the first crackly wash-and-wear shirts, and joking about the mad money she still kept pinned in her dirndl skirt; the shared jubilance of that cafeteria luncheon after you picked her up at the doctor’s office and she said yes, it was true; the wonder at the supple touch of her breasts in that first pregnancy, and, all in the same mélange, the weekends of reading The Death of a Salesman to her in bed and choking up, of reading 1984 and sweating bullets, of watching Mary Martin wash her hair, hating Captain Queeg, and listening to Edith Piaf and Paul Robeson on the old Magnavox covering the place where the Kem-tone had run out; of Sunday afternoons spent taking instant pictures of each other when the first black-and-white Polaroids came out in 1948, and playing Columbia’s first ten- and twelve-inch 33 1/3 LP Microgroove records in the summer of that same year and RCA Victor’s 45 rpm the following January and then feeling the sudden hunger for the old 78s, and playing them, and afterward haunting Nick’s and Eddie Condon’s after hours in the Village and walking the dead pavements of Fifty-second Street where Petrillo had killed swing and made way for bop, the tungsten-edged “progressive” jazz of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Outside Jimmy Ryan’s darkened bar you bowed your head.
It was a time of emerging social distinctions, of an awareness of taste, when the men you didn’t know wore clocks on their socks, called money “moola,” yelled “Hubba! Hubba!” at passing girls, bowled Mondays, sent singing telegrams to each other at 3 A.M., tied tiny bells to the bedsprings of newly married couples and listened outside, did imitations of Franklin Roosevelt saying, “I hate wah, Eleanor hates wah,” wore Robert Hall suits Sundays, tied foxtails to radio antennas, suspended baby boots from their rear-view mirrors, devoted Saturday mornings to ritualistic car washes, said “Long time no see” when they met, married wives who went to market with curlers in their hair and were always chewing gum, took their families to movies like Four Jills in a Jeep and Sands of Iwo Jima, but boycotted Monsieur Verdoux because Parade had exposed Charlie Chaplin as a Red.
Youngsters were now teen-agers (the word, which had come into general use, joined the language as “teen age” in the January 7, 1945, issue of the New York Times Magazine) and they were increasingly visible. Some inner-directed households kept them in their place. In her memoirs, Souvenir (1956), Margaret Truman wrote that she “was still called ‘the little Truman girl’—a designation for which I had the usual teen-age distaste.” Beyond the White House, however, Youth Power was reshaping social behavior, usually, older Americans grumbled, with excessive noise or bad taste. The younger ones were enthusiastic riders of scooters made from orange crates and roller-skate wheels.
With the number of popular songs up tenfold over the 1930s, there were now a half-million jukeboxes in the country, earning their owners 250 million dollars a year, all of it in nickels. The tunes were unmemorable, the words forgettable, but the jukeboxes were loved for themselves. They became so cherished an icon for the young that in 1947 the seniors of a Hudson Valley high school—Scarborough’s—presented one to the school as a class gift while beaming parents and teachers looked on.
***
It was during the Truman years that America irrevocably joined the community of nations. The phrase “United Nations” had come to FDR in the middle of one night during the bleak Christmas of 1941, when Churchill was his White House guest. In its January 10, 1942, issue, Time reported that “a new phrase, the United Nations,” had “slipped into the world’s vocabulary. The year before, a Fortune survey had found that barely 13 percent of the electorate wanted to see America in any international organization. By March 1944, 68 percent did. A cross-section of college students that same year endorsed the proposal to send a U.S. delegation to a permanent U.N., fifty to one. Sumner Welles favored the idea and had written an eloquent plea for world government, The Time for Decision. It was the August 1944 selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and sold almost a half-million copies. On the motion of Arkansas’s Congressman Fulbright, the House of Representatives resolved 360 to 20 to support “the creation of appropriate international machinery with power adequate to establish and maintain a just and lasting peace among the nations of the world, and… participation by the United States therein.” In the Senate the
measure also had bipartisan support.
Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Chicago, San Francisco, and the Black Hills of South Dakota were competing vigorously with New York for the honor of providing the United Nations with a tax-free enclave. One small Connecticut city—Greenwich—had testily voted not to receive the new world organization, but that was put down to anti-Willkie, anti-One World spite. These were the months in which Senator Arthur Vandenberg was brooding in his Wardman Park1 apartment, making his historic pivot toward faith in the viability of international interdependence. Crouched in a London air raid shelter as German robot bombs rocked the ground overhead, he had asked his escort, “How can there be immunity or isolation when man can devise weapons like that?” Vandenberg broke the power of his party’s go-it-alone faction when he told a hushed Senate, “I have always been frankly one of those who believed in our own self-reliance. I still believe that we can never again—regardless of collaborations—allow our national defense to deteriorate to anything like a point of impotence. But I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action…. I want maximum American cooperation…. I want a new dignity and a new authority for international law. I think self-interest requires it.”
Senators from both parties gave Vandenberg a rising ovation. The press hailed him for delivering a speech “of unquestioned greatness,” “the most important address to come from the Senate in the last eighty years,” “a courageous pledge to meet all aggression with force,” “a promise that there will be no more Munichs,” and “a shot heard round the world.” In the excitement Washington turned a deaf ear toward a shot fired on the other side of the world. Returning from Paris in a barely controlled rage, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam, proclaimed himself president, and took to the hills. The State Department’s Far Eastern desk issued no special directives to its men on the spot. After all, the rebels were only natives. Their insurgency was nothing a few companies of U.S. Marines couldn’t break up, if it came to that. But, of course, it wouldn’t. Vietnam was a French colony: the French Foreign Legion was on hand ready to suppress any serious uprising.
There was an elusive semantic problem here, and some grasp of it is important to an understanding of postwar weltpolitik. A quarter-century ago “the world,” “the free world,” and even “the United Nations,” were not global concepts. As late as 1947, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered his celebrated speech at Harvard launching the plan which would bear his name, it was clear from the text of the address that Marshall’s “world” was confined to North America, western Europe, and their allies and dependencies. There was no “Third World” then, or anything like it. It is startling to note that the United Nations declaration of New Year’s Day 1942 had been signed by just twenty-six countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, the USSR, and Nationalist China; five British dominions; eight European states, all of them then Nazi thralls; and nine South American republics. A united nation, in short, was one pledged to Hitler’s defeat. In 1945 there were only four independent African countries: Egypt, where British influence was still paramount; Liberia, a peculiar kind of puppet of the United States; Ethiopia, which had just been freed from Italian Fascists; and South Africa, then as now ruled by a white oligarchy. On V-J Day U.N. membership had risen to 51 by the addition of liberated European states, the Scandinavian countries, and scattered small countries, but it was still largely a gentleman’s club where one might clap his hands and call “Boy!” or assert independence by saying “I’m free, white, and twenty-one” without offending other members, including those whose skin happened to be black. The neighborhood, in other words, hadn’t started to go.
***
At postwar dinner parties in Manhattan’s opulent lower East Seventies, one of the smartest neighborhoods on that glittering island, the usual opening moves were to call for a drink—“Seabreezes,” gin and citrus, were in vogue—while making it quite clear that (A) you never watched television and (B) you thought Christian Dior had taken leave of his senses. In the first instance you may or may not have been on the level, but in the second you were dead wrong. Christian Dior was at least as sane as you were. An obscure, middle-aged Parisian designer at the war’s end, he had shrewdly guessed that women in the United States were still servile to fashions decreed in Paris and were ready to celebrate the end of Washington’s hated Government Regulation L-85, which had limited them to two inches of hem, one patch pocket per blouse, no coat cuffs, no belts wider than two inches, no attached hoods or shawls, and no skirt more than 72 inches around. In the five years since Paris had fallen, a great many American girls had become accustomed to unpocketed and ruffleless blouses, spartan suits, and short skirts, the last of which had also brought enjoyment to men. But Dior said no. In late 1945, the orphic couturier sketched abundant skirts barely twelve inches from the floor, with unpadded shoulders but stuffed brassieres (or “falsies,” as they were known), and shoes and hats that made men gasp. What Dior had going for him was that if women adopted his styles they would have to invest in entire new wardrobes. That brought the three-billion-dollar garment industry and the women’s magazines down on his side with a thump. The ecstasy of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and Glamour was unbounded. “Your bosoms, your shoulders and hips are round,” one writer sang out. “Your waist is tiny, your skirt’s bulk suggests fragile feminine legs. You are you!” Down with the barren, the harsh, and the sterile, they trumpeted on their slick pages, and up with Dior’s full, luxurious, abundant (and expensive) New Look.
The New Look: that became fashion’s war cry of ’46. For American husbands, apart from their dismay over Dior’s hidden leg, there was the prospect of bills running anywhere from $17.95 for a taffeta afternoon dress in Arkansas to $450 for a Paris original. In the case of their wives the stakes were more complicated. Most of them didn’t like the costs, either. To many the V-plunge necklines, curving waists, sloping shoulders, midi-lengths, and the frothy organdy blouses erupting from peg-top skirts were downright ugly. But there was more to it than that. The promotional drive was an insult to their intelligence. The very prose in the slicks was crackers: “In this issue,” Vogue giggled, “the merits of the cautious discard.” What did that mean? It wasn’t even a sentence. If women bought these absurd new outfits they would be conceding that they were dupes, the weaker sex, dithering little fools who couldn’t be trusted with the family budget and were a menace on the roads.
The difficulty was that women lacked options, because society was still tightly sheathed in taboos—or, if you like, self-discipline. Their mothers had taught them to be modest and gentle in all ways, so they glowed in their wrath and did what, within the context of the time, could be done. In Kentucky 676 working women signed an anti-New Look manifesto. The loudest complaints were over skirt lengths, because girls were accustomed to showing more leg, and this was one alteration Singer couldn’t make; it was impossible to let a short skirt down. “LBK” (“Little Below the Knee”) clubs sprang up in several cities; 1,300 Dallas LBK members marched through the shopping district with hems just below their kneecaps and LBK placards demanding freedom from French tyrants. In Paris Dior cried, “My God, what have I done?”—as though he didn’t know.
The crisis came in 1946–47. It had to be resolved quickly; millions of yards of full-flowered chiffon and lace were piling up in the garment warehouses of Manhattan awaiting decisions from Little Rock, Denver, and Seattle. Customers were under pressure, too. Every time one girl passed another on a sidewalk, each was frantically deliberating which way to go. Some found brief refuge in what might have been called the third world of postwar fashion: new looks that weren’t the New Look. Austere Britain, for example, was still rationing materials. Heels could be no higher than two inches, and clever Portobello Road modistes had designed “wedgies” with solid insteps that were cheap and looked smart. America’s own dressmakers had revived the bare midriff and introduced the strapless wired brassiere in 1946. As Easter
approached—it came on April 6 in 1947—the strugglers seemed locked neck-and-neck. And then feminine resistance suddenly vanished. Pushovers and dunces they might be, but no middle-class woman with cash or credit was willing to look like a frump that Sunday. Parading up the aisles, they clearly demonstrated to the rest of the country—that is, to their groaning husbands—that in matters of haut monde, a phrase which was not French by accident, they still danced to the music of a foreign piper.
In the aftermath of the struggle, the women guests not only struck their colors, they managed to forget that they had ever raised them. Women went about wearing, among other things, espadrilles, clogs, backless linen boots, spike-heeled “naked sandals,” and fezzes garnished with veils, feathers, and even birdcages. The excesses of the shoemakers followed a certain logic; limited in the length of leg they could show, women with trim ones were trying to attract attention with odd footwear, varicolored nylons, and multiple ankle straps. But the hats made no sense whatever. Neither did impractical matching gloves nor the bizarre handbags. If they were making any social statement at all, it was an assertion of feminine intuition and a woman’s right to be wrong, trivial, and fickle.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 63