Political and foreign reporting had become a great deal more serious during the Second World War, and there was no going back to the wide-eyed, we-are-confused-little-men fripperies of the bygone world. Reading the best of it here, you get an uncanny sense of writers coming to grips with issues and maps that are with us today. A. J. Liebling in Gaza and Janet Flanner in Algeria confront the emerging Middle East; Joseph Wechsberg in Berlin and Emily Hahn in China draw the fault lines of the Cold War. Bernard Taper’s travels with Thurgood Marshall, in his days with the NAACP, is an early look at the civil-rights movement. And Richard Rovere, a Communist who, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, had become an anti-Communist liberal, covered Washington as an outsider living in Rhinebeck, New York. His running portrayal of the malign phenomenon of Joseph McCarthy was some of the most impressive political coverage that the magazine had yet produced.
Harold Ross liked to pose as anti-intellectual—he famously declared himself unsure whether Moby Dick was “the man or the whale.” Shawn was without any such ambivalence toward intellectual ambition. One of the first writers he hired was Dwight Macdonald, who had been an editor at Partisan Review. Macdonald was capable of both outrageously witty criticism—as when he dissects Mortimer Adler’s Great Books set—and vivid, sympathetic political reporting, as with his Profile of the Catholic social activist Dorothy Day.
The postwar fifties had a certain technological utopianism about them—not unlike our current era—and the magazine was notably alive to this. Shawn was wary of modern gadgetry (he would not ride in an elevator without an attendant), but that did not quash his curiosity. There are pieces here on the whizbangery of push-button phones, videotape, home freezers, the “perceptron simulator,” data processing, and, with real depth, the dawning of the Computer Age.
Finally, Shawn had a sharp eye for that essential component of any institution that wishes to develop: new talent with new things to say. The fifties saw the rise of one such talent in particular, John Updike, who, for the next fifty-five years, was an unfailingly prolific and versatile contributor to The New Yorker. His fine-grained prose was there from the start, and, with time, his sharp-eyed intelligence alighted on seemingly every surface, subject, and subtext. Updike was, out of the box, an American writer of the first rank. He was profoundly at home at The New Yorker and, at the same time, able to expand the boundaries of its readers’ tastes. He could seem tweedy and suburban—a modern, golf-playing squire—and yet, as a critic, he introduced to the magazine’s readers an array of modernists and postmodernists, along with writing from countries far beyond the Anglo-American boundaries; as a writer of fiction, he was not a revolutionary, but his short stories make up a vast social, political, and erotic history of postwar America, or at least some precincts of it.
One of the more persistent myths of the magazine came up in those Ross-era files—the putative tyranny of its stylistic prejudices. Roald Dahl, whose story “Taste” is published here, wrote to one of Ross’s editors that he was in a “howling fury” because of the outrageous and peremptory changes reflected in a set of proofs that had just arrived in the mail. “You have sprinkled commas about all over the pages as though you were putting raisins in a plum-pudding,” Dahl wrote. “I know what commas I want. I know what phrases I wish to use. It is my story. I wrote it.” And yet, as any reader will see, even in the fifties, before the arrival of experimentalists like Donald Barthelme and Max Frisch, writers in possession of a real voice did not lose it, despite the magazine’s at times persnickety ministrations. Nabokov, Welty, Flanner, Ross, Liebling, Mitchell, Capote, Thurber, Updike—they are utterly themselves, their preferences and hesitations as distinct as can be.
Now we’ve moved downtown to the end of Manhattan island and into the tallest skyscraper in the city. From our floor, there is an astonishing view of the harbor that used to be Joe Mitchell’s beat. At a certain point, certainly by the fifties, Joe told editors and friends that the city was changing––changing so profoundly that he no longer saw it as his own and, gradually, he wrote more about the past, about his interior New York, about the memories that carved through the present like initials gouged in old tabletops. This is often what happens. Young men and women arrive and it is their work to describe the world that is becoming. That’s the way it is now.
A NOTE BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
HE FIFTIES WERE captured in black and white, most often by still photographers,” the journalist David Halberstam once observed. By contrast, the sixties (and every subsequent decade) were “caught in living color on tape or film.” The shift in film stock has produced—or maybe just confirmed—a perceptual bias. In our cultural shorthand, the fifties were a time of innocence, when Americans trusted their leaders, let their kids play in the street, attended church regularly, and had time to read weekly magazines.
Like all such formulas, this one is, at best, half accurate. After the Second World War, many Americans doubtless did feel the need for calm and stability. But change came, anyway—exciting, disruptive, and even radioactive. If the fifties were Leave It to Beaver, they were also Lolita. They were “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and the Montgomery bus boycott, Chevy Bel Airs and Sputnik, the opening of Disneyland and the invention of the H-bomb. The pieces about the American scene that follow reflect the decade’s dividedness. Taken together, they suggest a country in which little is changing and everything is.
In 1950, it was possible to go to the Sunset Appliance Store, in Rego Park, Queens, and, if the stars were aligned, be shown a twelve-inch TV by Jackie Robinson. “We” did this one afternoon and watched Robinson sell a set to a “short man in a heavy overcoat.” It may have been a stunt of salesmanship, but the authors of “Success,” John Graham and Rex Lardner, play along, and, even when Robinson is hawking TVs, his modesty and essential decency come through. Besides stealing bases, he has, it turns out, a knack for moving merchandise.
“Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is a classic Joseph Mitchell portrait of a marginalized New Yorker. In this case, his subject, George Hunter, lives, quite literally, on the edge of the city, in southwestern Staten Island. Eighty-seven, he is the son of a former slave and grew up in a community of black oystermen known as Sandy Ground. By the time Mitchell visits, the world of Sandy Ground is disappearing. The water has become too polluted for oyster farming and the village is all but abandoned. Mitchell and Hunter have a long, rambling conversation about revival meetings, about the two wives and the son Hunter has buried, about baking cakes, and about Revelation. Then they go to look at the community’s overgrown graveyard. The piece is carried by the rhythms of Hunter’s voice and by his dignity as death approaches.
“Ahab and Nemesis,” by A. J. Liebling, like Mitchell a stalwart of The New Yorker since the 1930s, and “The Cherubs Are Rumbling,” by Walter Bernstein, best known as a screenwriter who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, are both reflections on violence. Liebling’s is the lighthearted sort. His piece chronicles the heavyweight bout between Rocky Marciano and Archie Moore, and, in true Liebling style, it is filled with punchy lines and witty allusions, some of which land and some of which don’t. Bernstein is more somber. His subject is a gang of “delinquents,” the Cherubs, who are involved in a turf war with a rival Brooklyn gang called the Stompers. A well-meaning gym teacher, Vincent Riccio, is trying to keep the boys out of jail.
“Everybody thinks all you’re good for is breaking heads,” Riccio tells the Cherubs. “I know different—although I know you’re pretty good at breaking heads, too.” Sixty years later, the toughs no longer seem very tough. They hang out in a candy store. They have nicknames like Johnny Meatball. They wield switchblades and issue threats that seem cribbed from the movies they’ve seen: “Shut up a minute, or I’ll bust you right in the mouth!”
“Fallout,” by Daniel Lang, tells the story of an H-bomb code-named Shrimp. Shrimp was detonated by the United States on Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, and, as Lang observes, it was “the shot that made the world fallout-consci
ous.”
Calculations performed at Los Alamos had predicted Shrimp would have a yield of five megatons. Instead the yield turned out to be three times as great. The firing crew was stationed in a concrete bunker on Enyu, an island twenty miles from the test site. A few seconds after the blast, the bunker started to shake, one of the men later recalled, as if “it was resting on a bowl of jelly.” The explosion pulverized billions of pounds of coral reef and seafloor; much of this debris was sucked into the atmosphere by the rising fireball. When the radioactive dust settled, some of it fell on a Japanese fishing vessel, inaptly named the Lucky Dragon, and some floated down on the residents of Rongelap, a tiny speck in the Marshall Islands. The crew members of the Lucky Dragon arrived back at port nauseated, feverish, and covered with blisters. The Rongelap Islanders suffered radiation burns and their hair fell out.
The title of “Fallout” refers both to the radioactive dust and to the awkward situation it created for the U.S. government. Lang’s piece appeared more than a year after the “shot,” and the Atomic Energy Commission was still trying to allay public fears. The AEC’s scientists pooh-poohed the burns and the hair loss and treated the Rongelap Islanders’ forced evacuation as a sort of extended vacation. Lang seems, in large part, to accept the official line; for instance, he notes that the exiled Rongelapers have “been shown their first Wild West motion pictures, which they think are terrific.” But doubt creeps in, anyway. The Second World War is a decade in the past, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution a decade into the future, and Lang, in 1955, seems to be positioned, uncomfortably, in the middle. Reading “Fallout,” you sense a writer holding back, and the world rushing forward.
John Graham and Rex Lardner
JANUARY 7, 1950 (ON JACKIE ROBINSON, TV SALESMAN)
N LEARNING THAT Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ second baseman, is spending Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings each week as a television-set salesman in the Sunset Appliance Store in Rego Park, Queens, we hurried over to the place to see how he is making out. From a talk we had with Joseph Rudnick, president of Sunset, just before Robinson appeared, we learned that he is making out fine. Rudnick, a small, alert-looking man, graying at the temples, whom we found in an office on a balcony at the rear of the store, informed us that the accomplished young man had been working there, on a salary-and-commission basis, for five weeks, and that if he liked, he could work there forever, the year around. “Business booming like wildfire since Jackie came,” Rudnick told us, looking down at a throng milling about among television sets, washing machines, and refrigerators. “Sports fans flocking in here,” he said with satisfaction. “Young persons, curious about the National League’s Most Valuable Player and one of the best base-stealers since Max Carey. Jackie signs baseballs for them and explains about the double steal. Since he’s been here, he’s sold sets to Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, among others. The newsreel people shot him selling a set to a customer. He’s a natural salesman, with a natural modesty that appeals to buyers. The salesman wrapped up in himself makes a very small package. Campanella, Hodges, and Barney dropped by to wish him luck. Campanella’s his roomy. There’s Jackie now! With his business agent.” Robinson and a bigger, more strapping man with a florid face were making their way along the floor, the big man in the lead. “He’ll be right up,” Rudnick said. “Hangs his coat here. One other thing we do,” he went on, “when a bar buys a television set, we send Gene Stanlee over to the bar—the wrestler. Mr. America.”
Robinson and his manager for radio and television appearances came up, and we were introduced, learning that the latter’s name is Harry Solow. “Jackie don’t have to lay awake nights worrying about his condition, bucking that mob three times a week,” Solow said. Rudnick told us that Solow also manages Joe Franklin and Symphony Sid, and Solow explained that they are radio personalities. “Jackie’s all lined up for his own radio program,” he continued. “He’s mostly interested in boys’ work, though. Spends all his spare time at the Harlem Y.M.C.A.” “How I keep in shape is playing games with kids,” Robinson said in a well-modulated voice. “When I quit baseball, I intend to give it full time.” We learned that the Robinsons have a television set with a sixteen-inch screen and that their only child, three-year-old Jackie, Jr., likes Howdy Doody, Mr. I. Magination, and Farmer Gray better than anything else on video. As Robinson was about to go down to the main floor, it occurred to us to ask him if he’d developed any special sales technique. He looked surprised and replied that he didn’t think so. “If a customer is going to buy a set, he’s going to buy it,” he said philosophically. “You can’t twist his arm.” “On the other hand,” Rudnick observed, “the right angle for a salesman is the try-angle.”
We bade Rudnick and Solow goodbye and followed Robinson downstairs. A short man in a heavy overcoat got him first. He wanted to see a twelve-inch set. “There’s a bunch of them in the basement,” Robinson told him. “All playing at once.” He led the man down to the basement. We followed. It was quite dark there, but we could make out rows and rows of sets and see customers being herded from one model to another by spirited salesmen. Robinson conducted his man to a twelve-inch set, turned it on, adjusted the picture, and in rather a shout, to get his voice above the hubbub of the amplifiers, named the price and outlined the guarantee. “I like it!” the man hollered. “Could my wife work it—all those knobs?” “A child could work it,” said Robinson, and it was a deal.
FROM
Daniel Lang
JULY 16, 1955 (ON RADIOACTIVE DEBRIS)
ALLOUT, THE RADIOACTIVE debris that accumulates in the upper atmosphere following the detonation of a nuclear bomb and sooner or later comes to earth, often many hundreds, and even thousands, of miles from the scene of the explosion, is usually less visible than the soot that settles on Manhattan every day at the rate of a ton to every square mile. The particles of dust that constitute most fallout look like any other dust, cannot be smelled, felt, or tasted, and descend and land soundlessly. As a general rule, fallout can be detected only by instruments—notably, of course, by the Geiger counter but also by such less celebrated devices as the scintillation counter and the ion chamber. Scientists checking on the density of fallout frequently differ in their interpretations of their findings, but there is clearly no room for disagreement about one thing: This dry rain of tainted matter increases the degree of radiation in any locality it visits. The point of conflict among the experts, as I have come to realize while looking into the problems presented by fallout, is over the danger, if any, of the increase, and this at present seems to be more a matter of opinion than of scientific determination. It appears indisputable, however, that no community need be apprehensive over a slight rise in the level of radiation (as commonly used, the word is synonymous with radioactivity), for in normally rainy weather certain radioactive natural gases that almost everywhere are constantly emanating from the ground do not diffuse as readily as they do at other times, and so increase the amount of radiation in the immediate vicinity, occasionally as much as 400 percent—a phenomenon that has been commonplace all over the world since long before anyone ever heard of fallout and has been definitely proved to be harmless.
Fallout varies greatly in intensity, depending, in part, upon the amount of energy released—or, to use the technical term, “yielded”—by the bombs that create it. This nation’s high-yielding bombs are tried out over remote islands in the Pacific and its low-yielding models over the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Proving Ground. Early in 1951, the A.E.C. became sufficiently impressed by the fallout that its low-yielding bombs were precipitating on widespread portions of this country to set up a nationwide system of observation stations for monitoring fluctuations in the density of radiation. The system now has eighty-nine stations, and not one of them, whether near the test area or thousands of miles away from it, has ever failed to report a rise in radiation following a “shot,” which is the A.E.C. people’s term for the setting off of a bomb. Seemingly satisfied by the repor
ts from these stations, Lewis L. Strauss, the chairman of the A.E.C., issued a statement last February declaring that as far as the Nevada experiments were concerned, “the hazard [of dangerously radioactive fallout] has been successfully confined to the controlled area of the Test Site.” A month later, however, two scientists at the University of Colorado were reported by the newspapers as having asserted that fallout over their state had reached a point where it could no longer be ignored by those concerned with public safety. The Governor of Colorado, a former United States senator who served on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy while he was in Washington, responded to this by calling the scientists’ warning “phony” and saying that they ought to be arrested. The clamor quieted down when the president of the university issued a statement to the effect that the two scientists had qualified their warning by saying that the fallout would be dangerous if its radioactivity was maintained at the peaks it occasionally reached.
The Colorado ruckus was only one, and by no means the first, of a number of public warnings and bickerings over the issue of fallout. In 1953, the chairman of the Physics Department of the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, in a state bordering on Nevada, expressed the belief that Americans’ capacity for tolerating radiation was being sapped by fallout, and that same year five sheep ranchers in Cedar City, Utah, some two hundred miles from the Proving Ground, sued the government for damages, claiming that fallout had been fatal to approximately a thousand of their animals. The A.E.C. investigated and found no evidence to support the contention that the death of the sheep had been caused by fallout. The case of the sheep ranchers, which is still pending, brought back memories of the explosion of the first atomic bomb, on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico, which, among many other things, inflicted burns on a nearby herd of cattle and caused the animals’ hair to turn gray. (The cattle were presently sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they and, more recently, their progeny have been studied ever since by members of the faculty of the University of Tennessee School of Agriculture, who are endeavoring to determine the long-range effects of overexposure to radiation.) Fallout from that first explosion in New Mexico also contaminated cornstalks in Indiana that were later converted into strawboard to make packing cartons; some of these found their way to Rochester, New York, where the Eastman Kodak people innocently used them to ship out a supply of film, which is exceptionally sensitive to radiation. The film was ruinously fogged. It is now standard practice for the A.E.C. to forewarn photographic-supply companies of impending test blasts, so that they can take certain well-established protective measures against possible fallout, but so far nobody has come up with any similar measures to alert the owners of cornstalks.
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